While Nick comes off as aloof and insensitive, it is hard to believe he is a killer. Yet Amy’s diary, found in their house, tells a different story. She grew afraid of him and kept secrets from him.

Gone Girl is written as a first person narrative, alternating between Nick and Amy. Nick talks to us as it happens, and Amy, via diary entries from their years together. Flynn’s portrayal of the alternating male and female perspective is believable, as she weaves the tale of a love story gone horribly wrong.

Gone Girl is clever. It’s shocking, mostly fast paced and witty, with chuckle-out-loud lines in amongst the intrigue of this thriller slash relationship novel.

So did he or didn’t he? It’s difficult to review Gone Girl without ‘spoilers’ but I’ll try not to spill too much!

What I can say is that Gone Girl is packed with twists and turns, one huge one that changes the direction of the book. But the ending was rather wishy-washy! Yet left open for a sequel maybe?

Gone Girl has sold more than two million copies worldwide and rumored to be made into a movie staring Reese Witherspoon. It’s a book made for book clubs and there were many varying opinions at ours! Read it for a rather thrilling book for your book club or to discuss with friends over a glass of wine.

Lara (The Books & Company Book Club)

Helping them along are a flock of gorgeous Origami birds carefully folded by a Books & Company regular, 13-year old Mathilde Flinth Bredholt. Thank you, Mathilde!

Literature helps us see and understand the horrors of war. However, it is said that war literature requires distance in time and emotion.

Just think of Erich Maria Remarque’s best-selling book about the First World War, Im Western nichts Neues, (All Quiet on the Western Front), published in 1929, “Het Achterhuis” (Diary of Anne Frank), in 1947, and the lesser known What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng published in 2006, depicting a young man’s life during the Second Sudanese civil war in the late 1980s.

What these and many other works have in common is a description of lives, conditions and circumstances that most of us can only begin to imagine – the physical trials of living in barracks, battlefields and refugee camps, the psychological aftermath, the doubts, the fear, the regrets, the enormous loss experienced over and over.

On this tenth anniversary of the Iraq war and at the tail end of what has been dubbed The Arab Wars, we see the emergence of literature examining lives touched by these wars. One such book is The Yellow Birds.

Written by veteran and poet Kevin Powers (Powers served twice in the Iraq war) Yellow Birds is an intense debut novel with strong emotions and characters, writing that doesn’t even try to soften the blow and a first line that pulls you in straight away:

“The war tried to kill us in the Spring”.

There are aspects of war that one might understand; the need; the strategic considerations and perhaps even the necessary sacrifice. What is virtually impossible to grasp, however, is the cost in terms of who you become as a person, once you have seen battle. The Yellow Birds allows us to move a little closer to an understanding of this highest price paid.

The novel follows Pvt John Bartle as he tries to come to terms with his life before, during and after his service in Iraq, where suddenly “There was no center in the world.The curves of all our bells were cracked”. The storyline carries you back and forth from Virginia to Iraq to Germany to New Jersey and Kentucky and back, over the course of a few years.

Powers has a master’s degree in poetry – and it shows. The beautiful language and dazzling descriptions of events and details draw you in almost to the point of active participation.

Be it in describing the motivation behind signing up:

“…and really cowardice got you into this mess, because you wanted to be a man”,

or in the agonizing attempts at making yourself understood to a world you left as one person and are returning to as someone completely different:

“I feel like I am being eaten from the inside out and I can’t tell anyone what’s going on because everyone is so grateful to me all the time and I’ll feel like I’m ungrateful or something. Or like I’ll give away that I don’t deserve anyone’s gratitude and really they should all hate me for what I’ve done but everyone loves me for it and it’s driving me crazy”.

The beauty of the novel lies in the contrast between the almost serene descriptions of actions and milieu and the cruelty of the subject matter, as in the passages describing Daniel Murphy, a fellow soldier, as he completely dissolves, disappears and self destructs.

We turn away so easily from the horrors of war – we don’t like to watch it on television and we don’t like it spread across our breakfast tables on the front page of our newspapers.

But unless we experience it first hand (and few of us ever will) we will not understand what the people of Syria, Afghanistan and other countries are going through, so we must force ourselves to look at the evidence of war, and read accounts – fictional and otherwise – lest we forget that while there is no war at this moment on this continent, there are millions of victims – soldiers and civilians alike – who need us to remember that they too would like to live in peace.