Our House – Louise Candlish

On a bright January morning in the London suburbs, a family moves into the house they’ve just bought in Trinity Avenue.

Nothing strange about that. Except it is your house. And you didn’t sell it.

When Fiona Lawson comes home to find strangers moving into her house, she’s sure there’s been a mistake. She and her estranged husband, Bram, have a modern co-parenting arrangement: bird’s nest custody, where each parent spends a few nights a week with their two sons at the prized family home to maintain stability for their children. But the system built to protect their family ends up putting them in terrible jeopardy. In a domino effect of crimes and misdemeanors, the nest comes tumbling down.

Now Bram has disappeared and so have Fiona’s children. As events spiral well beyond her control, Fiona will discover just how many lies her husband was weaving and how little they truly knew each other. But Bram’s not the only one with things to hide, and some secrets are best kept to oneself, safe as houses.

Book information: Print Length: 445 pages. Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK. Publication Date: 5 April 2018.

Audio information: Listening Length: 12 hours 53 mins. Narrators: Deni Francis & Paul Panting.

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Sunday Times bestselling author ​Louise Candlish was born in Northumberland, grew up in the Midlands town of Northampton, and moved to the capital to study English at University College London. She is the author of 15 novels, including the #1 bestseller Our House, winner of the British Book Awards 2019 Crime & Thriller Book of the Year and soon to air on ITV as a four-part drama starring Martin Compston, Tuppence Middleton and Rupert Penry-Jones.

The Other Passenger, a noir tale of adultery and double crossing set among the Thames river commuters, is Louise’s first Richard & Judy Book Club pick and was longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award 2021. An international bestseller, it is now in development for the screen in the US.

Louise’s latest release is The Heights, a twisty revenge thriller whose narrator, Ellen, has a strange fear of heights known as ‘high place phenomenon’. To be published in paperback in the US in March 2022 and the UK in June 2022, it has also been optioned for TV.

Louise lives in South London with her husband, teenage daughter and fox-red Labrador Bertie,

My Review

I have a few (well ok more than a few) book quirks and one of them is that I can’t read a book after I’ve seen the film or TV series, so when I saw that Our House by Louise Candlish was being aired on ITV on 7th March and starred Martin Compston I knew I had to read it quickly. Luckily I had an audible credit so downloaded the book, popped the dog on a lead, put on my walking shoes and started listening.

I do prefer to listen to an audio book with more than one narrator as this brings more depth to each character’s voice and I become more immersed in the storyline. Our House is BRILLIANTLY narrated by Deni Francis & Paul Panting, so if you can listen to the book I would highly recommend this option.

Imagine coming back from a few days away to see a removal van outside your home, strangers in your house and all your belongings gone. That’s exactly what has happened to Fi Lawson in the opening chapter and then things go from bad to worse. Her estranged husband Bram is uncontactable, the children aren’t at school and the new owners are convinced they have legally bought the house.

Told over several timelines and from the points of view of Fi and Bram Lawson, Our House is an exceptional thriller and one I literally was unable to put down until that last sentence. Listening to Fi recount her story via a podcast, slowly revealing the lead up to the moment she saw strangers in her house and then hearing what the public thought about her story, and the chapters told from the moment she arrived at Trinity Avenue were riveting. My emotions were all over the place, sympathy towards Fi, anger at Bram, disbelief at the situation and utter confusion about Bram’s intentions and callousness, however when Bram recounted his version of events through a word document, my heart was racing and my stomach full of dread at how one mistake became a catastrophic life changing event that rippled across so many people’s lives.

I can’t stress how much I enjoyed this audio version and let’s not even mention the ending.. because I actually had to listen to the final chapter again just to make sure I understood the implications. This is, without doubt, one of my favourite audio books and I can not wait to watch the TV series tonight (although it’s a well known fact in the bookworm community that the book is ALWAYS better than then film!!).

Rating: 5 out of 5.

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