This is a great tome of a book. It had been recommended to me many times, but what finally spurred me on pick it up and start reading with intent to finish was the fact that it was suggested for book club. Nothing like a deadline to get you going.

I thought I would find it difficult to finish. But, it was a total page turner. I was hooked from the beginning and the adrenaline was constant. If you’ve ever watched any of the Bourne movies, it kind of felt like it had that constant ‘keep moving’ music pulsing away in the background, drawing you and on you in spite of the terror of what might be around the corner.

Here’s the book cover precis:

‘Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and an absent father, miraculously survives a catastrophe that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Theo is tormented by longing for his mother and down the years he links to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld.’

The story itself is gripping. You have to keep knowing what is going to happen next, how things will end. The writing is utterly compelling and the exploration of big ideas is seemlessly threaded right through it all. Ideas about love, fate, death, survival, the human condition, mortality, immortality, truth and illusion, the significance of beautiful things … the endlessly ponderable philosophical subject of the meaning and/or point of our lives good or bad, here on planet Earth.

There are moments of unutterable brutality and cruelty, and also sublime tenderness and human warmth.

What more can I say? It is an epic work and will stay with you long after you have finished it. Whether you liked it or not.