Fault Lines: Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa First Novel Award

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I carried this with me when we went to Seattle but was unable to read much at all as I was too worried and distracted. In a sense, both mother and daughter are running away from a particularly bad home situation, but the mother, not having fully reached her potential even in mid-life, does not know she is running. Her children are wonderful, her husband's career affords them a stunning apartment with a balcony, and she wants for nothing. The first half of this was mostly annoying but I persisted so it had something and was rewarded as it got better and better. I gave this a 2 rating as the last half of the story was just too unbelievable to me and written almost like soft porn or a Harlequin romance type story.

Fault Lines is full of laugh-out-loud, irreverent humor, as well as heartstoppingly poignant, yet seemingly incidental, wisdom. He really listens to her, they banter and laugh easily with one another and she finds that she is not only sexually attracted to this man but she has also become emotionally attached to him which makes her feelings even more complicated. When Siddons describes landscape, natural phenomena, or animals, she's at her best-- in fact, sometimes profound-- but her people are paper dolls, and the "dialogue" is straight out of Dr. I found it atmospheric and transporting but also wise, clever and universal in its exploration of love, family and identity.For me though, this rang so very true and so many of Mizuki’s thoughts and regrets really resonated with me.

Mizuki has spent a stint in New York, and blames this period abroad for her difficulty in accepting the constraints of her current existence, especially the high expectations on mothers. I am still pondering over the title, ‘Fault Lines’, is it a reference to the numerous earthquakes that rock Japan almost daily, or is it referring to her marriage and the lines that have begun to appear?For me it's the strong sense of place and Japanese culture that makes this short novel a worthy addition to the never-ending body of fiction on marital and domestic dissatisfaction. How long can she pretend that this will never go further than friendship, and that she isn't playing a very dangerous game spending time with him.

Not having to put it through the good-parenting filter I use for my children, or the perpetual war communication calculations I do with Tatsu, or the edited, rose-tinted truth I feed my mother.Corvus Atlantic’s commercial fiction list which includes women’s, historical, romance, sci-fi, crime and thriller. At any rate, the story is written in English (à la "Queen Elizabeth, pass the teapot please" English) and is rife with British slang. This was another Marmite book, but yet again, after hearing the author chat about the book, her upbringing and her hectic life as a mum, author and teacher, the book took on a whole new meaning.