You don't have to believe in ghosts for the dead to haunt you. You don't have to be a murderer to be guilty....

'This is about three deaths. Actually more, if you go back far enough. I say deaths, but perhaps all of them were murders. It's a grey area. Murder, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So let's just call them deaths and say I was involved. This story could be told a hundred different ways.'

For Penelope Sheppard, university offers an escape from her troubled past. Running from a life weighed down with scandal and tragedy, Pen sees this as the ideal place to reinvent herself among perfect strangers. Life in her new halls of residence feels like a wonderland of sex, drugs, and maybe even love. But all too soon Pen realises you never can run far or fast enough. And when Pen's secrets are revealed, the consequences are deadly....

Little by little, through Pen's flawed narration and tantalising diary entries, secrets, truths and lies come to light, and a dangerous dilemma unfolds, twisting and turning until the very last page. (From fantasticfiction.com)

ALL THESE PERFECT STRANGERS by AOIFE CLIFFORD (2016) | ISBN: 1471153622 / 9781471153624 (UK PB)| Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

Heart-thumping - astounding plotting & riveting writing! For those that need action & drama writ large just hold-on and you’ll find that this approaches with stealth!!! Awkward, uncomfortable, reading and utterly grippy-grabby by the run up to its stop… Mystery verging on horror, not my favourite genre but wow pulled off skilfully with super writing!

I can fathom why many have had mixed feelings about this, we have unlikable characters by and large and Pen is swiftly accounted an unreliable narrator in that we know she is editing what she’s told different people and what’s getting written - or not - in her ‘diary’. Let’s not forget the three different time spans, the recent past, current activities and the more distant past of pens school years, making the reading a bitty hipitee-hop, and that can directly switch some readers right off. Finally there’s the fact that this plays around in the morally ambiguous ‘grey’ areas in young adults lives when they are by and large re-inventing themselves adventuring with new types of situations and friends and stumbling part-knowingly into dangerous relationships.

ALL THESE PERFECT STRANGERS by AOIFE CLIFFORD is to be left somewhere ‘in-the-wild’ in Edinburgh on Sunday 21st April which is INTERNATIONAL BOOKCROSSING DAY 2019. You might have found this book beside an outdoor sculpture; on a window sill; at a bus-stop or perhaps you as a happy reader were handed this directly while you were in Central Edinburgh!!!
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