Book review: The Followers

If you’re looking for a summer read with brains, this is the perfect book.

Rebecca Wait

Picador, £12.99;

ebook, €10.20

Following on from a successful debut, The View On The Way Down, The Followers is a story predominantly about family — and here, about a child, Judith, observing the actions of a parent, yet being helpless to stop them.

Alternating between the present, where an adult Judith endures awkward meetings with her inmate mother, and ‘before’, depicting Judith’s childhood, the story of Stephanie’s imprisonment is unravelled cunningly and satisfyingly: After meeting the charismatic Nathaniel in the cafe where she works, single mother Stephanie is recruited to a simple life, moving with Judith to a remote farmhouse as part of a tiny community of which Nathaniel is the leader.

However, inevitably, tensions rise within the tight-knit group, climaxing in a disturbing act of violence that explains the present. A deftly written, compelling, and utterly accessible novel.