To “maybe Witney is right and the warden was coming, and if Witney is right, max and Aina are now both doomed” and various other possibilities between. Via flashbacks, the author takes the reader back to Aina and Whitney’s former lives, to how they met.

As it is, with omniscience at play, Watson uses the idea of funnelling his information from the broadest possible view, zooming down to the specific minutiae – and out again. These won’t be for everyone, but in terms of how they both managed family and writing while juggling a host of other commitments, they both gave me real impetus.A message is being conveyed about injustice or perceived wrongs, with specific use of words like “malfeasance” and “miscreants.

As days pass, Aina begins to suspect that their prison is part of a peninsula, and that Whitney has been keeping secrets. They’ve kept busy – Aina with her garden, her jigsaw, her music; Whitney with his sculptures and maps – but something is not right. We follow this through Aina’s perspective as she recounts the story in fragments, trying to keep herself occupied when she’s done everything that she can possibly do. Just like the great Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale, this author doesn't inform the reader of how the world becomes what it is in this story. There is little explanation of what has happened in society for restrictions on having children or why there is such a harsh punishment for breaking the rules.Sometimes terrifying, with heavy dollops of suspense this intricately layered novel reveals its secrets whilst maintaining a sense of impending doom. The natural world sits firmly at the centre of Metronome – the wild, rugged beauty of the landscape reflects elements of the western isles of Scotland and the Yorkshire Moors and serves as a desolate backdrop to the intimate, discomfiting claustrophobia of the controlled life inside the croft. There's