Intriguing tale that had me both confused and entranced at the same time. A novel about corrupt power would be my take on the main theme with strange powers held by the main character and her family. Veers between the violent and the comical a dystopian future awaits us if this ever comes to pass!

I just loved this book! It is such an original idea and the characters are so wonderfully acerbic and quirky that it made it a joy to read. It tells the story of Susan, a 43 year old physics professor who has the ability to make people open up to her just by being in her presence. This is the effect of the title and she is asked to use said effect to find out some information regarding the Future Commission. What spirals out from there is exciting, shocking and ultimately for me, really funny. I love the voice of Susan. She is a no-nonsense woman who makes no apologies for her odd nature and the way she carries herself (and us) through the story is fantastic. Hoeg has created a world here that is a little skewed from the one in which we live, but only in the fact that the action takes place a year in the future. The skill he employs means that each new thing that happens is perfectly believable and credible, given the narrative drive. The pacing is perfect and the odd reveal here and there are placed at just the right point to provide maximum impact. All in all, this book was absolutely great and I will definitely be checking out Hoeg's previous work.

The Susan effect is a complex, thrilling and compelling read, when once the book grabs hold of you. It was quite complicated to start ,with numerous revelations about Susan and her unique gift and peculiar family, that made you so intrigued, that the action simply flowed. There is a fair amount of scientific explanations in this story, that could be truth or cod, but an unique premise that made me think of Cold War espionage and many such untold truths that seem so fantastic and are true.
Susan is a physicist and her effect concerns her natural empathy with people. Upon meeting her, some are seized with an inexplicable desire to tell all their hidden secrets, particularly useful to her local and national police force!! She inspires candour and she balances the chaos in life.
Susan and her unconventional family are faced with prison for various misdemeanours and the slate can be wiped clean if Susan will help the government track down the surviving members of a state sponsored secret think tank known as The Future Commission. However, various accidents and deaths mean that whatever these members discovered is being suppressed by higher authorities and Susan must find out why, before she and her family suffer the same fate.
I really enjoyed this book and was sorry to reach the last page. As previously stated, it is difficult to get into, new facts enter the story that constantly reveal more about Susan and her life, and the style of writing is so matter of fact, it is hard to distinguish fact from fiction. We have all heard of think tanks and state secrets being suppressed, but probably not quite in such a murderous style!!
Part murder mystery and Sci-Fi writing, this is both disturbing and amusing in equal parts.
I have left this review on Goodreads today, a fantastic escapist novel.

Susan Svendsen is everything but an ordinary woman. And she and her family are in danger. She is offered a bad deal by the Danish government: use her special ability to provide them with an important information to have all charges against her dropped. Thinking of her twin kids, she has to agree and thus brings herself and her family even more in danger. But what is it about her gift? In Susan’s presence, everybody feels relaxed and comfortable, people cannot keep from sharing their best concealed secrets with her and she is to exploits this for the government. But the politicians have not counted on her intelligence and survival instinct and a most unfair battle begins.

Peter Høeg has made special women his protagonist before. Individuals with a supernatural sense and an extraordinary will to survive. In his latest novel, Susan is equipped with a skill that allows her to manipulate the people unperceivably which in itself is quite remarkable. But what make the character even more interesting is the combination with a straight down-to-earth intellect which does not accept anything outside the world of natural sciences. Susan can explain anything with her knowledge of physics and chemistry or biology, other fields such as music or religion just don’t reach her. This makes her contradictory and ambiguous in a very fascinating way.

The story itself is a fast-paced thriller which combines political complotting with action-packed chases and quite high number of cruel murders. However, the author never forgets his characters and their complicated relationships. The emotional facet blends in smoothly and thus adds to the cleverly constructed plot.

Underlying the whole story is a scenario which nowadays might still be considered something of the faraway future: parts of the planet will not be inhabitable due to climate change. How will we, how will our politicians react to this? If just a limited number of persons can be saved, who will be the selected few? As in other novels before, Høeg creates an extreme setting in which his characters are brought to the edge and have to make hard decisions, decisions about life and death. It seems to be a topic he liked, to play with how human being react in extreme situations. Thus, he provides us with the opportunity the think it through ourselves. Definitely a thriller with a lot of food for thought.

The Susan Effect by Peter Hoeg is a political/conspiracy thriller set in Denmark.

Susan has a unique ability to get people to tell her their innermost secrets which she shares with her husband and their two children. When the family becomes involved in a life changing scandal in India she agrees to use her 'power' to gather information on the Future Committee for a secretive and sinister government fixer in return for getting the charges against her family dropped. Things rapidly get out of control as she starts to unearth the final reports of the Future Committee and the conspiracy behind it.

This is a rather far-fetched but quite readable book if you like conspiracy, mayhem and a bit of near magical super powers.

A thriller that is a good read and really funny in places. A pleasure to read a book with a storyline that stands out. It is refreshing to read a well thought out book like this.

Review goes live on Butterfly-o-Meter Books on July 25 2017 at 00.00 am gmt+2 and will show up on Goodreads sometime later.

In a Flutter: Chilling and highly entertaining
Fluttering Thoughts:
Worldbuilding: Though the story begins in India, the main setting is Denmark. In a way, the story goes from the colorful vacation the Svensden family had in India to the bleak consequences of their fun times. I really loved the sharp focus on settings as events unfolded.
Characters: Susan is a strange beast I can’t comfortably fit in any category. She’s predator and prey at the same time. There’s a resilience and hopelessness about her that I resonated with on a horribly deep level. There were many traits of her personality that I strongly disliked, but she was an authentic human being who had means at her disposal and – like most human beings – chose to use them in her interest as much and as often as possible. At times she seemed distant, almost lacking empathy, and then at times she came through as intensely loving and loyal (mostly to her kids). Evoking the Effect, she gets a lot of information from those around, and she never truly becomes free of the weight of knowing all that. The sharpness of sight it gave her was crushingly realistic, bleak, and fascinating – like most monstrous things are. I loved Susan because felt real and terribly human in all ways I admire and despise about human beings by and large. I related to her more than was comfortable at times.
Her husband, kids, and mother came through much in the same light as Susan, though the star of the show is her. Peter Høeg is obviously a genius when it comes to building twisted, layered, complex characters.
Plot: The story is an intriguing mix of psychological thriller, drama, scientific approach, mystery, and supernatural (not paranormal imo, because we’re talking about human beings with mental powers, not truly out of the normal kind of beings). The pace of events isn’t terrible fast, but they come through as more poignant also because of that pace. The mystery of the Future Commission was intriguing and exciting, as was their race to find things out, but somewhere around the middle of the novel I felt like the story was dragging a bit and I was less into the whole conspiracy thing than the chase of the first half or so of the novel.
Writing: First person, present tense narrative, Susan’s POV. The timeline is a bit annoying to me personally, since we get quite a bit of flashbacks as the present timeline goes on – and I don’t much like flashbacks. But I did really like the writing style here: it’s sharp and expressive. I adored Susan’s voice and dry sense of humor.
Curb Appeal: Cool cover, hooking blurb – impulsive buy material for my psychological thriller cravings.

I recommend The Susan Effect to fans of stark views on human nature via an unbiased, somewhat emotionally detached view, to fans of intelligent works about intelligent people and their darker side.

Jeez. Megalomania detached from reality. The author should seek professional help.

The "special ability" of Susan is quite intriguing...

If only (honestly a genius) Claire North had written this book, instead of Høeg ! Wow!

As usual with my reviews, please first read the publisher’s blurb/summary of the book. Thank you.

By far the most irritating thing about this book is the author has a complete and utter disrespect of science and natural laws. Truly insulting.
Truth is to “truthiness”
as Science is to This Book.
(apologies to Stephen Colbert)
The characters are unsympathetic, pedantic and speak with almost entirely the same voice as Susan. Yeesh.

One thing Høeg gets right is how we are raping the planet, faster every day, and are unable to stop. Of course, there are a million other writers and journalists with the same themes.

Our point of departure was a hundred global risks, divided into six categories: economics, environment, geopolitics, society, technology, global resources. We picked out five main issues: chronic financial imbalances, greenhouse gas emissions, unsustainable population growth, extreme income inequality and a shortage of resources that would give rise to highly volatile prices for energy and agricultural products. ... The collapse isn’t some far-off future. It’s already started.

Mixed into this train wreck of a book are some fine quotes:

• “When I was twelve someone showed me the periodic table and I understood it immediately. It was the happiest moment of my life.”

• “Sometimes recognition has nothing to do with having seen each other before. Sometimes, as then, it is a sombre feeling of falling victim to an inexplicable and already existing intimacy, the origins of which cannot be pinpointed.”

• "That’s the problem of physics. It’s always been financed like this. That’s what Fermi meant when he said that regardless of what else the atom bomb might be, it was great physics."

• “That’s how it is with the great traumas. We keep returning to them. To remind ourselves of how irrevocably too late it is to do anything about them. And yet also to continue looking for some way out.”

• “Thit’s relationship to make-up is hard to explain. It’s passionate, but also exotic. She daubs it on the same way she dresses: extravagantly, especially around the eyes, as if bent on demonstrating that, to her, every day is a celebration of Cleopatra’s ascension to the throne.”

• “Great men always have formidable wives. The weightiest Nobel laureates have always had an Amazon at their side: Bohr, Fermi, Alvarez, Gorbachev, Sakharov, Schrödinger. And those who didn’t quite make the final cut were those whose women backed out: Oppenheimer, Szilard.”

• “For a brief, fleeting second, I may even understand what he means. That’s one of the inherent potentials of honesty – that for a moment another person may reveal to us a true mirror image of ourselves.”

I agree 100% ...
“She thought Reagan’s advisers, Perle and Cheney, ought to have been tried for crimes against humanity.”

Something magical happens starting around 48-50% through the book, mainly from the start of Christmas dinner. Pedantic science is transformed into romantic metaphor, truth becomes personal, a painful event of Susan’s past is explained, and the reality of Susan and Laban’s courtship is shown. Marvellous, mostly.

Sadly this doesn’t last. :(

So much stupid "science". Makes my head spin. The tracking device, the spy camera, the use of the word "quantum", the pride in which Susan spouts complete gobble-de-gook as if Høeg understands this in the slightest. Ugh, what a dork.

Cute homage? Get Smart Cone of Silence ?
In the middle of the room is what looks like a large bubble of clear plastic.

... utter crap ...
“‘A mere five kilograms. Twelve hundred needle rounds a minute and enough muzzle velocity for an adult torso to be torn open by the mere thrust of a single projectile passing by at twenty centimetres. Not only did I design and construct it, I can also hit thirty out of thirty-five moving targets in a minute and a half, at a range of eight hundred and fifty metres.’"

... Super STUPID. One cubic metre of helium lifts about 1 kilogram. So Høeg's ballon could only lift 100 kg. This stupidity will never fly.
“At close quarters the balloon doesn’t look like a balloon at all, more like a modern art installation. The buoyancy element itself comprises at most 100 cubic metres, harnessed within a lightweight metal framework that moreover holds the sail, a thirty-metre-tall construction of ...”

And finally, a Trumpian level of stupidity here -
“We would have set up a magnificent laboratory, you and I. Even the collider was going with us. I’d drawn up plans for a small electricity station. Fifty megawatts of hydraulic power.’"

So much potential in this book, some fine moments, but mostly drowning in technobabble and megalomania.

And the "James Bond" ending was laughably bad.

Ugh.

Susan is a physicist. The Susan Effect is that the people she meets want to confide in her and in doing so they will tell her the truth, which is useful in uncovering secrets.
The Future Commission were a government group who seemingly could provide accurate predictions of wars and other wide scale acts of violence. They voluntarily disbanded themselves in 2018. Susan and the immediate members of her rather strange family are each facing long prison sentences for various unusual misdemeanours. However, if Susan can find the minutes of the final meeting of The Future Commission, their offences will all be excused.
This book unfortunately was not to my taste. I am not a fan of science fiction and consequently I found it hard going. My rating reflects the fact that it did not appeal to me.

This crime thriller has been translated from the original Danish and as much credit should be given to the translator, Martin Aitkin, as to the author. Not since I read “Perfume” by Patrick Süskind many years ago has such a good job being done in my opinion.

Susan Svendsen is married to Laban and they have two 16-year-old children, twins Thit and Harald. The story commences at the point where they have returned from a year in India where they all have apparently committed serious offences. The mysterious Thorkeld Hegn appears and offers to make all the charges disappear but of course only at a price. Susan has special powers which make people open up to her whether they want to or not. He needs Susan to extract information from a friend. He needs the last minutes of the secretive Future Commission – and so the fun starts as members of the commission start to be found murdered...

The plot is complex but engaging. I discovered I had to find out what happened next despite the need to pay close attention to the text. The language used does not take prisoners. It will be considered by some to be high-brow and will not please everyone. I revelled in it and was delighted to find an author who did not pander to the lowest denominator. Reading the story was therefore constantly challenging but additionally, the style of writing was at the same time free and in many ways uncomplicated.

I loved the way in which Susan and her twins were brutally honest with themselves and spoke the truth without considering the effects on others. Clearly, this is a modern family in all senses of the word. However, there are family secrets and the subplot deals with Susan’s search for answers to issues in her past.

Whilst it took me a while to immerse myself in the plot, once there I was fully involved and itching to find answers. My only small criticism might be that it is overlong but nevertheless, it earned its five stars.

mr zorg

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

The ‘effect’ is extreme empathy, and while Susan Svendsen is a strong example of the surprising results of being an empath, if she is together with her twins their power is multiplied by three: grumpy people smile, reveal themselves, their secrets, roll over backwards in attempts to please, and—most important—change the odds in their criminal attempts to advantage themselves and other ‘elite’ associates in creating a new world as civilisation threatens to break down entirely. That their assumptions might hasten that breakdown doesn’t seem to bother them unduly. And who are ‘they’? They were a committee (of sorts) of young people from many fields who were brought together to have ideas about helping civilisation itself, though their astonishing gifts enabled them to predict a series of global disasters.
Neither Susan nor her about-to-be-former husband know that they are on the list of ‘elite’ citizens who are to be saved. All they know is that they have suddenly been repatriated from India in order, it seems, to be tried for offences committed in South Asia. It doesn’t seem possible to say any more, since any hint about why their lives seem suddenly at risk would involve A Very Big Reveal.
What I can say is that while this is a book which belongs in a long lineage of protecting-the-planet plots (yes, Miss Smilla haunts the pages), or a shorter lineage of post-apocalypse novels (no, not Cormac McCarthy). For one thing, the book is too funny to be a serious thriller, though it certainly shares conventions with thrillers (‘I have no idea what’s going on here but I’m damned well going to find out’). Hoeg doesn’t always control the nitty gritty of the multiplying murders, and comedy undermines seriousness when, for example, Laban (the ATBF husband) evades capture by turning a Chinese delegation into something remarkably like a glee club. Still, Hoeg writes well, Aitken translates well, and I read this in a few hours. Nonetheless, this is by no means a trivial book, but one which asks Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who will guard the guardians)?

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC of this book.
Like so many other fans of Peter Hoeg I am always looking forward to his latest book. The Susan Effect starts off a little confusing, and it took me a while to get a grip on the story. However, I’m a fan of Science Fiction and hence this dystopian story gripped me eventually.
The Susan Effect is not the first book I’ve read in which a ‘secret’ group of people try to change our world – and not for the better. It is, however, one of the most intriguing and clever ones. How ‘strange’ the characters may behave, after a while I realized that it is not them, it’s just my idea about how people should behave. They are not strange, just different. I really liked this; this is what a good story does, it makes you think and not just enjoy the story.

Not the easiest book to review, particularly if you are familiar with, and enjoyed, Miss Smilla's feeling for snow. While both novels share themes that require a significant suspension of disbelief this later work really requires a quantum leap in terms of the reader's credulity. Sometimes this works, how else would Harry Potter and a wide range of fantasy novels sell? But authors that appear to want to engage the reader at the level of the real world ought not to take the wide range of liberties that Hoeg does in this novel. The translation, too, does not have the fluency seen in Miss Smilla. Add to these disappointments a mild irritation with the nods that Hoeg makes to conspiracy theorists and rather too many foolishly contrived plot twists and you will appreciate that this reader did not enjoy this book as much as expected from the previous encounter with Miss Smilla.. This is a shame as there were plot elements that worked and, in the first half of the novel at least, there were attractive features in terms of the development of the Susan character and her family, as well as - for someone with an interest and familiarity with the history of modern science - interesting and relevant references to key developments in twentieth century physical science. However the unsubtle polemic concerning an elite bent on self-preservation against an unspecified threat, that was a central feature of the plot, lacked credibility and was poorly executed. Overall, then, this is something of a curate's egg of a book; I wanted to see how the novel ended and read the last third in one short burst to get to the resolution, but became more and more disappointed as the weird and contrived plot structure was revealed.

This is an intense and thrilling dystopian crime fiction from Peter Hoeg, set in Copenhagen, Denmark. Susan, and husband, Laban and their twin 16 year old children, Harald and Thit have spent a year in India and every single one of them is in serious trouble. To avoid prison and other charges, Thorkeld Hegn, an extremely powerful man, offers to make all their troubles disappear if Susan will do him a favour. They return to Copenhagen and their family home, and Susan who has a gift for making those around talk without people being able to avoid it, visits Magrethe Spliid to get her hands on missing minutes of meetings of a powerful and under the radar group, The Future Commission, and identify members of the group for Hegn. Susan has used and abused her gift in the past, and her entire family have similar aspects of this gift. She is a notable Physics Professor, and sees the whole world through the lens of science and Physics in particular such as cooking and relationships, a fascinating approach. She sees troubling issues and problems as koans until they dissolve.

There are two timelines in the novel, in the present where Susan and her family find themselves in dire circumstances being spied on and having attempts made on their lives. There are forces that do not wish the Future Commission and its doings be accessed and are willing to be ruthless in their efforts to pursue this aim. We are then given information about Susan's past, her connections with the Nobel prize winning Andrea Fink through whom she met her composer husband, Laban, and other events in her life. The gifted members of the Future Commission, all of whom are wealthy, are being murdered in horrendous ways, such as within a washing machine. With Susan's entire family under threat, Susan digs deep and resolves to protect her children, irrespective of the cost to her. The gifted family's talents get them access to almost anywhere. As they become aware of the turbulent future forecast that threatens the entire nation, Susan finds herself confronted with her past and her family in the battle to survive.

Not everyone will be comfortable with reading a book that is firmly located within a scientific framework. I found it an absorbing, engaging and compelling read. The character of Susan is not always likeable but she is a charismatic, determined and inherently mesmerising character, you never know exactly what she or her family will do, or come up with. Susan carries a crowbar with her as her weapon of choice, and even saves the life of a man colluding with keeping the family interned. It is wonderful to have Peter Hoeg writing again, tackling huge global themes which are likely to lead to the dystopian future that he imagines here. A superb read that I recommend highly. Thanks to Random House Vintage for an ARC.

This certainly began well, with Susan, her husband and 16 year old twins all either in prison or on the run. The premise was intriguing too, that certain individuals, including Susan (hence the 'Susan Effect') having particular powers that cause people to blurt out the truth around them, or give into suggestion. This was tied in with a mystery and murder.

So far so good, but it was about 30% too long I thought and would have been a better novel with tighter editing.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Random House UK, Vintage Publishing for an advance copy of The Susan Effect, a conspiracy thriller set in Copenhagen.

Susan Svendsen and her family are rescued from trouble and potential jail time in India by Thorkild Hegn who promises to make all the charges go away if Susan will do him the small favour of using her ability to get people to open up to her to interview Magrethe Spliijd and find the minutes of the last 2 Future Commission meetings and the names of the attendees. Unfortunately it is not such a simple favour and it puts the family in danger.

The Susan Effect is quite a strange novel. On one level it is a straightforward conspiracy novel but it takes a lot of reading to get to the heart of the conspiracy. The novel switches between the plot and Susan's memories of her past which take in her relationships with family and colleagues and while they are interesting they are a distraction from the main action. Then there is "the Susan effect" which is what they call her skill although it is shared to some extent by her husband and children. No matter how much Susan tries to dress it up in scientific language it is some kind of supernatural empathy which acts on people like some kind of truth serum, except it only seems to work when the plot requires it. There is also a fair amount of scientific jargon in the novel, due to Susan being a physicist, which all went over my head.

I enjoyed the conspiracy part of the plot as it is full of action and quite addictive, Susan's life and thoughts not so much because, quite frankly, she's weird and possibly psychopathic. She's detached emotionally and has an unusual approach to parenting and life. Yet I couldn't help but eventually warm to her desire to protect her children and her quirky take on life.

I really struggled with this book. Keen to read it because of the title and as a Susan, I was very keen to know if I had any special hidden powers. Still not sure I'm afraid. This is sci-fi and I tend not to read such books as they often go over my head. This could well be the case here. It could be great but I don't understand it.