The House Guest by Charlotte Northedge

In my opinion...

I’d kept seeing reviews of this novel and then all of a sudden it appeared in my inbox, a gift from the publishers…so I dropped everything else and started to read.

As joint Head of Books for the Guardian, Charlotte Northedge knows what readers in the psychological thriller genre are looking for- and she supplies this in a book that is tightly plotted with many twists, hooks, red herrings and suspense.

It is a very unsettling story with suggestions of gaslighting and quite dark, making me feel uneasy. At times I felt very frustrated by Kate, she didn't seem to have a lot of common sense- but that didn’t stop me staying up late into the night to discover the final, final twist!

Thank you to 'Fairy Godmother' Harper Collins & NetGalley for my copy.

Want to know more?

The perfect family. The perfect chance. The perfect lie.A stunning novel about motherhood and betrayal, for readers who love Sarah Vaughan and Louise Candlish.

‘Deliciously dark and totally twisted’ ERIN KELLY ‘Very acute on class, aspiration, women and status’ SARAH PERRY, author of THE ESSEX SERPENT

Kate trusts Della, and Della trusts Kate. Their downfall is each other.

When Kate moves to London after the disappearance of her sister, she’s in need of a friend. A chance meeting leads Kate to Della, a life coach who runs support groups for young women, dubbed by Kate as ‘the Janes.’

Della takes a special interest in Kate, and Kate soon finds herself entangled in Della’s life – her house, her family, and her husband. It’s only when she realises that she’s in too deep that Della’s veneer begins to crumble, and the warnings from ‘the Janes’ begin to come true.

Why is Della so keen to keep Kate by her side? What does Kate have that Della might want? And what really lies beneath the surface of their friendship?

My rating...

An uneasy four glasses of bubbles