This novel was almost perfect.

The writing is brilliantly accessible, the characters are extremely realistic but very unlikeable, and the plot twist was perversely delightful, as I didn't see it coming.

Highly recommend it.

This was a beautifully written story. I enjoyed every second of this book and took no time to finish it. I would highly recommend it to others

I enjoyed this book! However, I do think I would have enjoyed it more had I gone in with the right expectations. The description hooks readers, but I think it does a little disservice to the material itself, because it set me up to expect an intense mystery with a huge, climactic reveal, and that's not really what this book is about. It's more of a character study, a least that's what I thought, rather than a thriller. The ending (to me) was relatively obvious pretty early on, maybe not the exact details but generally. So had I not gone in expecting some insane, unpredictable twist (that was actually heavily foreshadowed and not uber surprising) I would have had a better experience! Then again, maybe without that description I wouldn't have picked it up in the first place, so who know?!

That being said, the book itself was really intriguing! The characters, though not likable, were a total draw and the story had me flipping the pages late into the night to see how it would all end! The writing was on point and I enjoyed how we got to see every event from every angle--I loved how differently each character perceived the world and thought that part was very well done! I wish there was a little more at the end, the big event happens and then it just sort of stops, and I wanted more! I wanted to see how deeply they were affected--which just shows how interested in the story I was!

All in all, a good summer read! And it's full of wonderful descriptions of Italy, so really, you can't go wrong!


*FYI, I got this from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review!

It is an amazing book to read, taking the reader through the emotional roller coaster of failed marriages. It uses a relatively common literary matrix but fills it up with good writing and a story that keeps you breathtaking until the very end of it. A very recommended summer read!

“Although you never know in a marriage who is responsible for what, do you? Husbands and wives collaborate, hiding even from themselves who is calling the shots and who is along for the ride.”

Sircausa is a delicious gem of a novel – a story set in a chaotic Rome and on the island of Siracusa, where place becomes another character. But, despite and in spite of its exotic locale, which adds to the pleasure of this travel novel, this is essentially a story about marriage. About its fragile heart, its deceptions, its comforts and its sometimes dangerous and treacherous outcomes.

Siracusa centres on the lives of two couples, and the story is told from their four viewpoints in alternating chapters. I happen to love the Rashomon-style of narrating in which different versions of the same event are presented by each character. I find it intriguing how we all perceive reality differently, and this novel presents this device faultlessly and smoothly.

Fortysomething New Yorkers, Michael a writer and his wife Lizzie, a freelance journalist travel to Italy with Finn, who is married to Taylor. They have a child, ten-year-old Snow, whose strange name echoes the strangeness of her opaque nature, and who will serve to move events along to a cataclysmic conclusion.

There are undercurrents running through the story – Finn and Lizzie were briefly together in their youth. Taylor is more in love with her child than her husband it appears, and Finn exists on the margin of this too-close and tight relationship between mother and daughter. Taylor is the least likeable at first, with her prissy mannerisms and fear of germs, but somehow, through the telling, you start feeling a sympathy for her.

Rifts are appearing in Lizzie and Michael’s relationship, a fact disclosed to us through Michael’s observations. In Lizzie’s chapters, she is somewhat blissfully unware of these tensions. Lizzie is loveable and likeable, her warmth shines through while Michael’s hesitations and confusions run rampant.

But this is also a travel novel, as such, and the observations around encountering a strange place are pithy and spot-on. Here’s Lizzie on the pressures: “I have to confess, sightseeing makes me feel inadequate. I expect to have an emotional experience— swoon, feel my heart swell, be awed in the face of, in this case, such a monumental architectural achievement. But it never happens.”

And, in a further demonstration of how differently different people experience life, here are three different descriptions of Siracusa.

Lizzie: “The tattered buildings, many with bow-shaped delicate wrought-iron balconies, were cared for in touching ways: a spiky miniature palm in a terra-cotta pot by a door, flower boxes, plastic windmills on sticks— cheery cheap carnival prizes— stuck between balcony spokes or shutter slats. Everything was sweet and innocent, and proof of how small people were before hormones in milk. No earth, no grass, only stone. It made voices echo, bounced the light, gave everything back. Perhaps that was why the few people I passed spoke softly. Perhaps, like me, they were in awe. That this world still existed, inhabited, joyful, seemed miraculous. I fell in love.”

Michael: “Siracusa. Already destabilized, I was further unmoored by the chaos of its narrow streets. A place that refused to adapt to its conquerors, whose ancient footprint still ruled, wasn’t going to bend to my will. Every time I turned a corner I thought I was someplace I’d just been.”

Finn: “Saw Lo Scoglio for the first time. Big fucking boulder. Eerie at night, not so comforting in the day either, but at night it rose up black and prehistoric. A small crowd of revelers teetered over a bridge to get to it. I could barely see a railing. It looked like a miracle, people walking on air. The wind was up, waves crashed against the boulder, throwing up a white spray. The people shrieked and retreated.”

As the story unfolds and the couples travel from Rome to Siracusa, cracks between all of them start appearing, and at times it feels as though each is travelling separately. Pace and tension build, secrets spill out like oil, and as dirty and capable of staining. The read is fast, gripping, almost thriller-like, woven through with observations about marriage that ring astoundingly true. Lizzie, musing on the institution asks: “And why do most of us want marriage? Crave it for status or for stability that is an illusion. Marriage can’t protect you from heartbreak or the random cruelties and unfairnesses life deals out.”

In a conversation with Lizzie, Finn notes that she says, “There are some people who shouldn’t marry. Some people are best single, and pity the ones who marry them. And you know what else? There are some people who dump all their misery into marriage, make wedded bliss their neurotic nest, and the best version of them lives outside that ugly place.”

Siracusa is simply brilliant, thought-provoking, sensuous and angry all the same time. The cataclysmic dénouement throws all these elements up in the air, and will leave you questioning not just the nature of relationships and the compromises we all make in any life, but will make you question these compromises, what we’ll do for those we love, no matter the morality of those actions.

Excellent book. Great main characters and plot. I would recommend this book.