There was absolutely no reason for this self indulgent rambling mass to be released. I enjoy books with a lot of detail, good descriptions and a plot that doesn’t just state what’s going to happen. There was some merit to that but unfortunately, it was lost in pages and pages of repetitive nonsense. The repetitive nature of the story did not allude to mental illness or racing thoughts, or anything the author seemed to think. It took away from the story and made it unbearable. I’ve read reviews as well as criticisms saying the book is actually supposed to be about the writing process and it does definitely cover that however, why use 400+ pages to say what could be easily covered in 200 without losing anything… it felt very much like an attempt to be a modern day Beckett but was totally off putting. The story would have been good and interesting but the pages and pages of ridiculous descriptions and ramblings made it painful.

At its most basic level Stephanie Bishop’s new novel, The Anniversary, is about a tragedy that befalls a married couple onboard a cruise ship midway to Japan. But scratch a little deeper and it is so much more than that.

The themes of gender, power, truth and creative control are all fleshed out in this well-crafted story, which uses the devices of the psychological thriller to build suspense and keep the reader second-guessing what might happen next.

It’s a page-turning literary read because the author expertly drip-feeds snippets of information, so you must continually reassess the narrator and wonder what she’s not telling you — and why.

For a more detailed review, please visit my blog.

I knew he was much older than me, but at the same time he seemed somehow ageless as all new gods appear in the eyes of those who worship them.

On the footage your face is blurred, pixelated, made unrecognisable. A series of tiny moving squares. It is more than one man, normally. You see one man on either side of the faceless woman.  

Back in my room, I waited for the ice to melt pressed the cold glass against my forehead, the ice softly popping a little and cracking in the water. For a moment my body registered this sound as its own; as if the bones in my skull were hinging open a little, coming adrift by small increments. This error brought its own relief - a momentary conviction that the dark matter of my brain was giving up its tension, that the bones of my skull were widening a fraction so as to give my thoughts more room.

When I read a book, I write a little review on Goodreads and I give it some categories, just to help me find it more easily later, or collect together with books that cover similar themes, and The Anniversary fits into so many, and that's what's interesting about this book. Genre-defying, subject-defying - once I was prepared to just go with it, I really enjoyed it. JB is a successful writer up for a big prize. She's been married for a long time to Patrick - a successful screenwriter and film director much older than her. For a long time they've helped each other with their work, but they've recently been drifting away from each other and so JB persuades Patrick to go on a cruise with her to celebrate their anniversary. But in the middle of a storm, Patrick falls overboard. JB continues to Japan, and then back to the UK and then to America to collect her prize, and then to Australia and finally back to the UK where Patrick's death is questioned. Is this a murder mystery? No, but almost. A literary thriller? Well, definitely literary. A courtroom drama? A little bit. A family drama?All those things and more. It's a slow unravelling of a marriage by an unreliable narrator, stopping on the way to think about art and artists and writers. I really enjoyed it.

There's a fine line between loquaciousness and rambling, and the prose in this book leapt far over that line.

The early section is fine, until the main disastrous event occurs. But then we become stuck in seemingly-endless ruminating by our narrator. I had been skimming pages rapidly for a while before I finally got fed up and skipped ahead to near the end. But I quickly gave up on even finishing it.