A disturbing read, tough at times due to the subject matter. It's very cleverly done and leaves you wondering - who is lying? What is true and what is imagined? The main character, Elissa, is great! I was rooting for her the whole way, which was why some of the scenes were hard to read. Very dark and very twisted! Read with the lights fully on.

Billed as the must read book of 2020 and described as chilling, moving and unputdownable, “The Memory Wood” is certainly a book to be looking out for next year and was admittedly a read I did not expect.
“Elijah has lived in the Memory Wood for as long as he can remember. It’s the only home he’s ever known. Elissa has only just arrived. And she’ll do everything she can to escape......” With a premise as intriguing as that, it was impossible not to get addicted to the story from the very first page. Due to the twists and turns in the plot, you’re really kept on your toes and the emotional rollercoaster you’re on when the story plays out, really draws you in and doesn’t let go. Told from the perspective of three characters only - frail twelve year old Elijah, thirteen year old chess prodigy Elissa and DS Mairead MacCullagh, I liked how the chapters overlapped between Elijah and Elissa and how they expressed their intense thoughts and feelings. Mairead’s personal and emotional issues during the investigation into Elissa’s disappearance was truly palpable and my heart went out to her when she discovered her worst fears had come true again. The author chose a denouement that was both powerful and emotionally charged and I’m not frightened to admit I did feel tearful during the last few pages. The first half of the book was a slow build and often a little repetitive but this created a sinister and creepy atmosphere. The second half kicked off with a cruel race against time and I couldn’t help but be totally invested in the rescue of Elissa. She was a very clever, mature and likeable girl and the author has created a brilliant character that showed strength and determination not to leave her mother alone should she die.
Written by Sam Lloyd, I understand the germ of the idea came when he drove his son to a chess tournament at a busy secondary school venue and a wife who constantly worried about imagined nightmare scenarios involving their first born son. Something every parent at some point imagines and which is totally relatable and normal. The author then plotted the story around these events and ended up with a novel that’s unforgettable, nightmarish and totally unique.
Fantastically written, tensely plotted and perfectly executed, I thoroughly enjoyed reading “The Memory Wood”, it had everything I like from an original thriller and I expect it to be a much sought after bestseller as soon as it’s released.
5 shiny but creepy stars!

If this isn’t a best seller in the making I’ll eat my rather stylish trilby! This is a book that makes your eyes pop, inhale and forget to exhale, your jaw drop and utter the odd (mild obviously) expletive and sometimes all four at the same time which probably isn’t pretty. To sum up what this story is about is hard but basically the central aspect is the abduction of 13 year old Elissa Mirzoyan whilst she attends a chess competition in Bournemouth. She is manacled in the cellar of a ‘Gingerbread House’ in the creepy ‘Memory Wood’ where she realises that she is not the first occupant which crystallises her desire to survive her ordeal. Elijah lives in a cottage in the woods, he is friendless and not at all worldly wise. They become Hansel and Gretel and what ensues in this terrifying story is so twisty it’s tortuous. Just as you think you have the answer to this another twist comes. It’s a horror/mystery, wrapped in a puzzle and tied up with an enigma and I love it!

This book is very well written and although it’s told from three perspectives (Elissa, Elijah and D Supt Mairead MacCullagh) the story flows effortlessly. Elissa is simply amazing. I love the way she uses chess and chess gambits in order to survive and her cleverness defies her years. Elijah’s story is so sad it makes you want to weep and Mairead ties her own circumstances to the investigation thus making it deeply personal. This story is dark, like the grimmest of Grimm's Fairy Tales and it has many analogies and characters you would find in fairy tales and I’m not talking Disney here. There’s Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, there’s a witch or hag, there’s a good huntress and a huntsman, who doubles as the big bad wolf, we have a gingerbread house and no fairy tale is complete without a dark wood. On occasion, it has a feel of a horror movie as some of the images are so visual and interspersed are dark but appropriate Biblical quotations that add another dimension. The ending - oh my stars - what can I say? Bated breath? Yes, yes, yes and a little tear in my eye.

Overall, an incredible book which I could barely tear myself away from, in fact, my kindle had to be almost prised from my hands as I read far into the night! Highly recommended if you like dark and twisty.

Huge thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK, Transworld Publishers for the ARC.
Expected publication 20/2/20.

The Memory Wood is a pulsating, hair raising thriller. It’s every parents nightmare. You will not want to put this book down till the end.

Elissa, a normal 13 year old except for a rising talent in Chess. Raised by her adoring Mum, Elissa is nurtured in her talent and has high hopes.

On the day of her biggest tournament yet she calms her fears and starts off very well. As she progresses through her matches, she takes a break to retrieve something from the car and everything changes.

Elissa is catapulted into a cold, black world full of fear and ghouls. Then Elijah a 12 year old boy enters and Elissa discovers that he is far from what he seems. As she grapples with hunger and pain she discovers new depths to her desire to survive. She contrives ways to deceive fragile Elijah into helping her escape but does it work?

The twists and turns in The Memory Wood will astound. This book is undoubtedly the best I’ve read this year.

My thanks to NetGalley and publisher Random House UK - Transworld Publishers, for the ARC.
Oh My Goodness - such a cleverly woven psychological thriller! I was astounded by the way the story unfolded - didn't see that coming - more than once!

Thirteen year old Lisa (Elissa) Mirzoyan is kidnapped into a dirty white van in broad daylight and awakes to find herself imprisoned in a stone basement. She's a talented chess player and uses those strategies to map-out her dark, cold environment, concluding that she is not the first person to have occupied this space.
Elijah (Eli) knows his brother Karl has bought him a replacement and tauntingly befriends Lisa as he's only 12 years old. He wants her to teach him how to play chess and in return he gives her nicer things. He calls her Gretel; she calls him Hansel.
Bryony Taylor had been abducted a year previously and Detective Superintendent MacCullagh, in charge of investigating Lisa's disappearance, draws parallels between the two. Bryony has never been found.

The narrative follows Eli's life in a stone cottage on the edge of Memory Wood and his visits to Lisa, as well as the menacing interactions between him and Karl. Despite Lisa's pleas, Eli cannot let her go; she is his only friend - until he realises she's tricked him and the investigation gets too close and he has to make a decision.

This is a well-written, twisty (and twisted), shocking thriller. Lisa's desperation and despair is palpable.
This is the stuff of nightmares.
Totally absorbing.

I found this book to be very dark and disturbing and struggled to start with as I felt quite emotional. However, I am glad I stuck with it as the plotting was incredibly well structured and the combining narratives come together nicely. Child abduction and suffering is always going to be a tough one, and as a parent even more so. However, the developments provide hope and the conclusion, although tragic in many senses has enough light to balance the book well.
I loved the intelligence and resilience of the young victim and the dedication of the lead police officer investigating her abduction. The central narrative of the young Elijah is full of puzzles and conflicts; this drives the story to it's thrilling and dark end.
A heart-wrenching and unusual thriller of trauma, grief, betrayal, abuse and hope.

At the beginning I found this book hard going but was glad I persevered. Elissa, the kidnapped girl, is a plucky and clever heroine and I was rooting for her all the way. Twists and turns meant I had no idea how the story was going to end. A different and exciting read.

Gripping from the first page to the last. I read it in a day because I just couldn’t put it down. Our main character is a chess champion and I loved how her story In captivity, is laid out by her imagining a virtual chessboard where she stores what she remembers. What an amazingly clever concept.
All the main players have their own stories of loss and horror running through the main story and there is a twist to one of them that completely changed how I viewed the character.
I truly couldn’t predict how it would end and when the end came the book only gained in pace. There’s an exciting new author on the block and I can’t wait to read more.

This is one of my reads of the year, I ripped through it in a few days.

It’s a creepy and twisty thriller and the use of different perspectives makes it stand out from what is a very crowded genre.

What a shocking book. It was difficult to follow to start with but as the story unfolded I was drawn In and simply couldn’t put it down. Persevere with it & you’ll be rewarded

This has got to be one of the best, most interesting and exciting books I've read recently. Loved it. I would definitely recommend this book!

#TheMemoryWood #Netgalley

The problem with this book is that I wanted more!!! From the start it grips you and you immediately want to know how Elissa will survive. I did guess Elijah’s secret but that was ok as it was still intriguing and actually didn’t give away ALL of the twist. My only disappointment was I wanted to know more about ‘after events’ as I’d been so drawn into the story I didn’t feel it was ‘complete’ enough and was left wanting more.

WOW! The first thing you should know is that I instantly had to write this review upon finishing the novel. The Memory Wood is a chilling story about the abduction of a 13-year-old girl, Elissa, and I don't think I have ever read anything quite like it.  Do not be deceived in thinking that this is like any other thriller you have read which involves kidnapping. It is not.

When I first started reading The Memory Wood, the prose was quite alien to me in a way that it was something I hadn't come across before, and I honestly wasn't sure how I felt about it. It's difficult to delve too much into the specifics without giving away the various twists and turns, but the further into the story I travelled, the more I realised just how clever and meticulously thought out it was. It's easy to go into this one thinking you have it all figured out but you are definitely in for an unexpected journey which leaves you feeling as lost as Elissa, deep within the woods.

The writing is simplistic and doesn't delve too much into laborious description about the mundane, and yet this is what makes it so addictive because it focuses on exactly what it needs to. Told using multiple narratives, Lloyd does an excellent job at creating characters and voices that even the darkest of writerly minds would have a hard time pulling off.  

There are some harrowing scenes throughout the novel and Lloyd makes sure not to gloss over these, hitting us hard with raw, and often graphic, moments. That being said,  it's tasteful in that these moments are absolutely necessary to really capture the sinister atmosphere that has been created. The story unfolds in ways that I did not expect, and after reaching the half way point, I wasn't sure how it was going to end. I felt like I was on an emotional rollercoaster in those final chapters and Lloyd manages to create reader empathy where it honestly doesn't feel like it should be possible!

Finally, there are some great themes around loss and parenthood woven throughout the novel, which play nicely into the main arc of the story. Thank you to both Netgalley and Random House UK. Transworld Publishers for giving me the opportunity to read and feedback on this fantastic novel.  Watch out 2020!

I really enjoyed this book. I found i. Could not put it down and how it had a real twist to the story. I loved how Elijas character kept you guessing what was coming next, and what did come next was most of the time not what you tried to guess would happen.

A very strange and different book about kidnapping and abduction with so many twists which I mostly didn't see coming, though there were a few that were more obvious. Elissa is a 13 year old chess champion who is abducted while attending a tournament with her mother, She only pops to the car for a second when she is brutally grabbed and bundled into a white van and taken away. Having been drugged she next wakes up manacled in the basement of a derelict cottage. Elijah is the twelve year old boy who lives in the cottage close by to The Memory Wood and befriends her though he doesn't help her escape as he wants to keep her there. Then we have the female detective who leads the case. All we really know about her is that she desperately wants a child of her own but keeps having miscarriages. This makes her particularly keen to find Elissa though I'm not really sure why it's relevant - wouldn't we all be desperate to find a missing child?
I loved this book and read it in three sittings. I would have given it five stars for its total originality other than some of the 'other' characters could have been fleshed out a bit more, especially the detective.
Thanks to Netgalley for letting me read this brilliant book. I know when I've read something this good - I need a gap before starting something new.

Thank you to Netgalley for a copy of this book. When I initially read about this book, I knew I wanted to read it, and couldn't wait until its release in 2020, I'm grateful I got the chance.
This book is a thriller at heart, but has a heart wrenching twist you wknt see coming, I even shed a little tear at the end.
The story is told from the points of view of a young girl, her abductor's son, (or is he) and the detective trying to find her. I loved how the story unfolded and could not read this book fast enough, it had me hooked from the start. A thrilling read. Make sure you buy a copy, I promise you wont be disappointed.

At first when you read this book, it seems as if Sam Lloyd has started off in the same place as John Fowles did with “The Collector”. But he goes in a different direction and through a different set of dangers to arrive in a different nightmare. This makes for a gripping read, if a disturbing one.

Fowles was inspired to write “The Collector” when he connected his literary studies, which revealed that a “girl being held captive in a cellar” was a common folk tale all over Europe, with a real case post WW2, where a boy had kept a girl captive in an air-raid shelter. He realised that this was not a myth, “urban” or otherwise, but something that really happened, quite widely and perhaps quite often. Since The Collector was published in 1963, there has been a steady stream of real-life cases bearing out Fowles’ observation, but not all of them have involved a psychotic individual culprit. Some, from Australia and latterly the Netherlands, seem to involve sub-cultures; some family-based or family-sized, others somewhat larger; cults if you like. You get a long way into The Memory Wood before you realise that it is about a sub-culture which in turn revolves around an individual and by the time you know which of the characters this actually is, you’ve almost reached the end. This book grips you, not just to thrill and entertain, but to teach you that sub-cultures can be at least as dangerous as the “lone psycho” that our popular culture leads us to fear more.

Along the way you also learn that lost souls will go where they are led, until something or someone intervenes and they go towards the light, sometimes with the very last of their strength.

2nd of November 2019.

Someone has been kidnapping children for years, but none have ever been found. A taut thriller, this book centres around 3 people: 13 year,old Elissa, a very smart and tough chess player; Elijah, a 12 year old boy who has lived for years in a tied cottage with his family near Memory Wood, and Mairéad, a senior police officer, whose own problems make her more determined than ever to help Elissa, whatever the cost to herself.
This is an extremely well written book, very fast paced and with chilling realism although at times it makes quite grim reading. However there are enough twists and turns to keep the reader interested right to the end. Well worth a read.

I received this pre-publication e-book from Random House UK via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. (Review posted on NetGalley, Goodreads and Amazon.)

Thirteen-year-old Elissa is suddenly and violently abducted from a car park and awakes in an underground cell, scared, confused and brutalised. Her only human contacts are her abductor, whom she christens the ghoul, and the strange and erratic Elijah.

Elijah has lived in his home near the memory wood for as long as he can remember. Desperate for a friend, he visits Elissa but refuses to tell the police where she is being concealed; he has his own agenda. Elissa is not the first girl he has found in the wood, and he doesn’t want her to leave.

This book has already gathered some momentum, and it did not disappoint. It grips from the beginning, and maintains that hold until the final page. Oddly, it felt like an American thriller – I had to keep reminding myself that it was set in the UK (near Salisbury, to be exact). The writing is tight, and the plotting is expert; there are multiple twists, and several reveals which caused a rapid reassessment of everything I had read to that point. The characterisation is convincing; the narrative comes via three voices (Elijah, Elissa and Mairéad, the SIO searching for the serial abductor who has taken Ellissa), and all are complex and distinct. Elissa’s fragile relationship with Elijah becomes her lifeline, but he is unreliable in the extreme, and Mairéad has her own demons to battle.

This psychological thriller is dark and compelling, and the plot gathers pace well. The final denoument is … well, no spoilers, but I found my reading pace accelerated towards the end, and the round-up is satisfying. As a debut novel this is an impressive achievement. Highly recommended.

I really enjoyed the story although I admit to being a little confused on occasion. I found the girl extremely strong and self possessed - perhaps a little too much for her age group. However, I understand that she was no ordinary teenager. The third story of loss that long alongside the main story - again about a mother losing her child - was just as sad. All 3 stories of losses - whether it be losing parents or losing children - were all very cleverly intertwined. An interesting read that will keep you hooked.