I really enjoyed this book and thought Doughty was an excellent storyteller. It takes a talented writer to make you want to continue reading a story you've seen before, but there are still a good number of twists and turns to keep you thinking. There aren't many books I've read lately with this type of protagonist, and it really worked for me. And it certainly makes you consider your own life, your own relationships, and how a seemingly rational person could be so overtaken by desire and fear. Yvonne didn’t want to tell her husband – she couldn’t without telling him about her affair – and she tried to cope alone. But she couldn’t cope, and she chose to talk to her lover. And that set off a chain of events that would end with them both on trial at the Old Bailey. So who thumped on Yvonne’s car window with such force last week it made both her and us jump out of our skins? I have been agonising over it all week, with all manner of awful scenarios rushing through my fevered brain. Could it be ghastly rapist George instead of lover boy, who had gone to put the frighteners on the beast?

It was only at the very end, when all of the drama was over that the story maybe lost a little credibility, by leaving no space for the reactions of Yvonne’s wife and closest friend. The resolution was a little too simple for the story that had gone before.

Series Info

The reader is kept on tenterhooks by an unreliable narrator. We have only Yvonne’s word to make our judgments, to align our sympathies and guess at the truth. Louise Doughty plays out the suspense, twisting the road so we can never see more than a step or two ahead. To say more would be to get into spoiler territory. But I can at least say this: Apple Tree Yard is a book of amazing psychological acuity. It explores essential questions such as, “When you are a rational being, with free will and agency, is there any such thing as a point of no return?” It examines how far we go to extract revenge, to develop and mine our own fictions, to become a survivor at all costs. And ultimately, it displays how far we can go when we fall out of love with ourselves. From the Guardian: "What a thrill it has been to watch Apple Tree Yard fail to live up to its initial billing as thinking person’s bonkbuster. The series materialised in a thunderclap of notoriety, with considerable hubbub attending a stage-setting scene in which two middle-aged strangers enjoyed a steamy liaison in a House of Commons broom cupboard. But, like the awful hostess at a dinner party later in the episode talking of another rape case, who am I to criticise a rape victim for not doing the right thing? “Everything in your world is lovely,” Yvonne snapped at her. “So you don’t really have the imagination to see what it’s like when bad things happen, just randomly, great torrents of sh*t descending on ordinary people!” I mean, I’m sure there are hundreds of wiry blokes with glasses and wavy brown hair that are irresistible babe magnets, and lots of highly educated, high-achieving, happily married women who are desperate to ---- (ahem!) in a broom cupboard in the House of Lords (or it could have been the Commons, I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter), but I would say the chances of such a pair meeting and mating was not a million to one, as Yvonne thought, but about a zillion to one against. And even if such an unlikely pairing occurred, how could it be sustained without passion, intelligent conversation, common ground, or any reason on earth to sustain it. And even if it were sustained, is it likely that a bloke who had a couple of ahems and a few coffees and carrot cakes in various cafes would go and top someone who had injured his insignificant other?

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. They bump into each other again at another café and the affair takes off. He says he is a civil servant, but still we don’t know his name or what he really does. Adding to her thrills, and given his expert knowledge of CCTV among other things, Dr Carmichael soon surmises he is a ‘spook’. She’s feeling not only mysterious, but naughty, and a bit young again, and she loves it. Who wouldn’t? Suspenseful, erotically charged, and masterfully paced, Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard is an intelligent psychological thriller about desire and its consequences by a writer of phenomenal gifts. ( From the publisher.) There was some very clever and well thought out writing going on to make all of that work, to keep the story compelling, and to keep a degree of suspense to the very end. I cried, I really did. And, boy, it takes a lot to make me do that. But that’s how stonkingly good this sensational psychological thriller has been.

There is a strong message here that – contrary to what you might be led to believe from Every Other Drama On Television – female sexuality doesn’t suddenly end at 35, but can become more powerful and more profound. Certainly for Yvonne it does, even if it somehow leads her to court.

Maybe the man she met, when she was giving evidence to a Select Committee at the Houses of Parliament saw that. And maybe she saw something in him. Or maybe it was a classic coup de foudre. Whatever it was, they fell into an intense, physical affair. And when it came to stealth and daring there were no flies on lover-boy – not done up, anyway. It was all hurrah and hot flushes all round. After their risqué sex around London I could even imagine a whole new tourist bus tour!Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to put the wind right up that pathetic piece of sh*t,” said her lover after they had resumed relations in a so-called ‘safe’ house. That was were the story began – with Yvonne in the witness box, being asked about Apple Tree Yard, and knowing when she hears those words that her world is about to crumble. It’s a dramatic, attention grabbing opening, and I so wanted to know what had happened, what had led her there. Rape on television is often an unthinking plot device, used to destroy women or spur avenging males. Here, mercifully, Yvonne is not diminished; damaged but not destroyed. As the story gets darker, turning through consequences and revelations (rather than twists), it’s her power, more than her lover’s, that comes under close examination. She can influence others and deceive herself. Director Jessica Hobbs rations out plot details in a model of fleet visual storytelling and elliptical ambiguity. In her shots, the details of London tend to dissolve into soft focus, all watery blues and burning orange, as though the narrative winds between a daydream and panic of wakefulness. Doughty inevitably draws upon the dramatic irony of a geneticist condemned by her own field of research: “DNA made me and DNA undid me. DNA is God … one of the few discoveries of mankind that mean there’s no point in being a liar.” But she also uses the model of the genome to explain how the small, consoling fictions we tell ourselves build up into complex patterns of deceit: “It is human nature to let people think that we are something more glamorous than we are. I let you believe that I am one of the nation’s top geneticists, when actually I am a moderately successful scientist coasting on past research.”