All These Perfect Strangers

Thanks so much for letting me review this book - it was brilliant!

The writing in this is fantastic and I agree, very similar in style to that of Donna Tartt but this story is in a league of its own; definitely one of the best suspense thrillers I've read in the last few years. The characters are so well developed and the story flows with ease. I recommend adding this to your TBR right away.

This was unnerving and compelling. Loved the Australian setting, so many characters seemed like types I could identify from my uni days, or from the small town in which I grew up. I'll be recommending this one to friends & family.

Who do you believe? The truth is so interwoven with lies and everyone has their secrets. Pen is off to Uni and to a new start after her best friend was sent to prison for killing a policeman but what is Pen's part in all of this tragedy? Why are young girls been killed at her Uni and what has this got to do with Pen. A well written story that makes you think about what you believe.

The story is set in 1990, a time when cigarette smoking was tolerated, drugs were widely available, women's equality was being hotly debated, gays were starting to come out and sexual abuse in institutions was still being covered up.

Eighteen tear old Pen (Penelope) who was raised in a small country town by a single mother is a seeing Frank, a psychiatrist, in order to get a certificate for a court case involving traumatic incidents at the distant university she has been attending. Frank encourages her to write down what happened at the university and read her notes out to him. Also, he is trying to get her to open up about something that happened in the town three years previously, which led her to becoming his patient at the time and about which she has never spoken.

The story is narrated in first person by Pen. Gradually the story unfolds about what happened at the university with flashbacks to the incident in the town when she was 15.

Pen comes across by her own narration as devious at times. Then again so do almost all others in the story particularly the other students. She omits parts of her diary when reading to Frank but the reader is privy to all she has written. However because of her deviousness we wonder whether she is being completely honest in her writing and in her narration.

The story well paced, the many characters are well developed and we don't get confused as to which character is which. The sting in the tail right at the end made me feel that the author had hit me over the head with a large club.

I rarely give five stars to a book but this one comes close. I am giving it 4.5 stars.

‘This story could be told a hundred different ways.’

Somewhere in Australia, Pen Sheppard goes to university. The perfect place, perhaps, to escape from a small-town past. To reinvent yourself and make a new future. But within six months, three of her new friends are dead. What is Pen’s involvement in these deaths? What is the truth about Pen’s past? And just how reliable in Pen as a narrator?

‘This is about three deaths. Actually more, if you go back far enough. I say deaths, but perhaps all of them were murders. It’s a grey area. Murder, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So let’s just call them deaths and say I was involved.’

The story unfolds in a number of ways: partly through a journal Pen is keeping for her therapist, partly through direct narrative. Pen moves between past and present, between her hometown and the university. We know that she is filtering what she writes for the therapist – the journal is intended as a means to an end, not as documenting a journey of self-discovery. Pen is trying to escape. But why, and from what?

University life seems perfect to start with: new friends, new experiences, freed from the past. But as Pen discovers, the past cannot be so easily abandoned. I found this novel absorbing. Many of the characters seemed real as did a number of the situations. I started to care about some of these characters. I wanted to know the truth.

I read this book comparatively slowly, resisting an impulse to read quickly to the end. Ms Clifford’s writing drew me in, but I needed time to absorb Pen’s story, to allow the atmosphere to build and to wonder about some of the other different ways in which it could be told.

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster (Australia) for the opportunity to read this book.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

A murder mystery where the deaths just keep coming. Two teenage girls in a life changing situation. Later one heads to uni to study law, surrounded by strangers, who all have their own secrets! Death just keeps surrounding her, or is she a killer? A well written plot which comes together elegantly. I would not have picked this as a first time effort, but truly look forward to the next offering.

I was provided with an advanced copy by All these Perfect Strangers by NetGalley for an honest review.
A young woman with a complicated past attempts to secure a new future but as she undertakes treatment truth and lies weave together in a clever thriller. Penelope has returned home after attending her first year at University, to a town that she hates and where a great number of people hate her. In an attempt to help her resolve and discuss her feelings about events that have occurred, her psychiatrist encourages Pen to commit to paper the story of what has occurred. We soon learn that Pen is linked to a series of murders that have been committed at University and we learn of an earlier incident as well. This is fast paced and you are quickly devouring the words on the page. I knocked this book over in a day and I really did not want to put the novel down. You are from the first page just completely absorbed into Pen’s world and it is wonderful. Clifford’s style is engaging and she succinctly captures small town and University life. You can smell, touch and taste what she captured on paper. There is a rich tapestry of characters that all carry their own unique stories and issues. As the story is told from Pen’s point of view we are limited to her perceptions of the characters. This is both useful and limiting as Pen I find is an unreliable witness. The voice of Pen is what guides you through this tale and it will be a great talking point amongst book clubs as to whether she is a reliable witness to the events. I find her to be unreliable for a couple of reasons. The first being her naivety as she comes across lacking any worldly experience and her social awkwardness. At other times she appears savvy and aware of who is trying to manipulate her. She is a difficult character to come to terms with and that is a good thing. It is her perception of other characters that makes her as unreliable as a witness even further. How much do you believe of what she tells you about Rachel, Kesh, Rogan and Michael? Can you trust everything she says and is really a victim or the perpetrator of all these incidents?
I will not give away the ending but I have noted others have struggled with it and I did as well. I did go back and read over the text a couple of times to ensure I had not missed something. For me it does not quite work as what happens is outside of Pen’s sphere of influence and just seems to come from left field. There are some clues along the way (I think – the angina attack is related) but it certainly is a matter for debate at the book clubs.
Clifford has previously won some Ned Kelly awards for her short stories but her first full length published novel is a corker. It has all the right elements for a great thriller and the right mix of ambiguity to make you question what the truth is and what lies are being told. Grab a copy you will not be disappointed.

5 stars for a debut novel by a talented Aussie writer. Good story and characters.

I love her style. At one point she mentions a secretary distracted by her new computer. “It’s a light grey beehive of a box that hums all the time. I can tell she’s a bit on edge by the way she presses a key and then pulls her hand back as if it’s got teeth.”

Pen Sheppard is an Aussie teen sitting outside her psychiatrist’s office waiting for an appointment she doesn’t want to keep. She just wants him to write a report about her pain and suffering so she can file a claim, get out of there, and get on with her life.

It’s not going to be quite that simple. Frank, the psychiatrist (who seems a likeable bloke) insists she needs some follow-up after dropping out of treatment a couple of years earlier. Just write some notes to make it easier, then he’ll do a report.

Pen has somehow been involved in three odd deaths, the first when she was only 15, which led her to Frank in the beginning. We don’t learn details until much later, but we know she’s THE bad girl in a small country town and unlikely to shed the reputation. . . ever.

“This is a town that spends its life peering out from behind the curtains at other people’s business.”

There are no identifying place names, and that sentiment is universal--this could take place anywhere in Australia.

Her mother is a battler with dreadful taste in men, at least one who preyed on Pen, which has made Pen wary and defensive. But she’s more keen than nervous to travel to a strange city to start studying at a university to which she’s won a scholarship (bursary), the first ever granted.

She is warmly welcomed by the Master of the school who tells her that “University is an excellent place to reinvent oneself”. Less inviting is the flyer she finds in her room warning everyone about an attacker with a screwdriver. No worries. “I was used to my mother’s gun-loving boyfriends. A screwdriver didn’t even seem like the person was trying.”

This is uni and the first freedom from parents some kids have experienced, and feelings run high, as they do, and kids get a bit wild, as they do, including the usual sex, drugs and rock and roll. Nothing over-the-top . . . until there is another misadventure in which she may be implicated.

She’s really not sure who is who, but “Being amongst strangers was exactly what I had wanted and it’s definitely what I got.”

We are taken back and forth between her conversations with Frank, her memories of life with her best friend and Mum (and Mum’s boyfriends), and her first year at uni. The author uses chapters, italics, dialogue and internal monologue so skilfully that I never felt lost or confused, although I know Pen was! It seemed quite appropriate to have past memories crop up in later situations.

Pen’s voice is perfect, varying between bold and brazen and frightened. She’s as much a victim of hormones and teen-aged angst as anyone her age, and she’s very good at rationalising things to suit what she so desperately wants to believe is the truth.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me a review copy of this wonderful first novel.

**Quotations are from the advanced review copy so possibly subject to change.

I personally love stories set in Australia and even more so when I know the locations however while this novel is set in Australia somewhere, it could have been anywhere; very little of the story was location dependent giving it a universal appeal - a story of a young women facing and dealing with trauma and emotional turmoil.

This is definitely an incredible debut novel by an Australian author. A gripping story which held me and didn’t let me go! I was completely caught up in Pen Sheppard’s narrative as she shares her internal reflections and perspective of events, moving from present to past, from small home town to university campus, smoothly and without losing the flow of the story. Little by little we slowly learn what has happened in Pen’s past and her insight of how that and the present are creating an emotional turmoil of dealing with the world around her. The story has many twists and surprises that keep you in suspense.

Thank you to Netgalley and publisher Simon & Schuster (Australia) for an ebook copy to read and review.

"Murder, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So, let's just call them deaths and say I was involved".
This had me at hello!
I loved this. So tautly written, so suspenseful. I found myself at one point looking at my phone and seeing I had only four hours left to read until the end. I was seriously tempted to push through and finish it in one sitting. Sure it would mean I would be up until half past three in the morning but a the loss of a few hours sleep seemed worth the trade off. It's that good.

I found it reminiscent of The Secret History and Carol Goodman's thrillers set in academia without being derivative of either.

The ending for me (or the part that involved the school) was not as strong as the start however this is a wonderful debut. I will be eagerly anticipating Aoife Clifford's second novel.

Thank you so much Net Galley and Simon and Schuster for the advance copy.

Pen Sheppard is looking forward to starting University. She has won a bursary to live in college on campus and is looking forward to escaping her small rural town and studying law. Something very bad happened to Pen and her best friend Tracey when they were 15, leaving Tracey behind bars and Pen seeing a psychologist. Now she’s looking forward to a new start in a new town full of ‘all these perfect strangers’ with the chance to re-invent herself. However, the story opens with Pen back at the psychologist’s waiting room following several unexplained deaths at the college.

In this debut novel, Aiofe Clifford has created a slow burner with the story flipping backwards and forwards as Pen’s time at college is narrated alongside her later visits to the psychologist and the accounts that she writes for him in her diary. The suspense is ramped up slowly as the events of the past are gradually unveiled, although Pen is an unreliable narrator and the truth is not always clear. Everyone has their secrets and the truth and lies become confused and intertwined. Clifford brilliantly captures what it is like to be young and free, living in college, making new friends, navigating the rules for sex, alcohol and drugs, enjoying campus parties and somehow fitting in a bit of study. It’s hard to feel sympathy for Pen as she invents her own version of the truth and she comes across as an uncaring and self-centred friend. In the end some of Pen’s secrets start to unravel, but her future is left a little ambiguous. Overall, this was a gripping psychological thriller and a very good debut novel from an exciting new Aussie writer.

As a debut novel All These Perfect Strangers had an unexpected level of complexity to the writing, which I enjoyed. This is the first novel I have read using the “unreliable narrator” point of view and I was fascinated by the extra dimension this approach added to the complexity of the storyline. I loved wondering if there was more to what I was being told.

The author structured the storytelling to include both what happened in the past and what was taking place in the present. The use of a diary as a means of conveying the story allowed the main character, Pen Shepherd, to choose what she told her psychiatrist and, therefore, what she told me as the reader. Again, the unreliable narrator kept me wondering how much was true and what else I needed to know.

There were some interesting twists along the way with regards to Pen's stay at the university and some of the characters certainly contributed to their own fate.

I was initially attracted to this story by two lines in the description. I suggest they encapsulate the main theme of this story.

"You don’t have to believe in ghosts for the dead to haunt you."

"You don’t have to be a murderer to be guilty.”

If you like an intricate storyline with interesting twists you should put All These Perfect Strangers on your To Be Read list.

This review will be live on my Blog closer to it's release date

In 2013 Aoife Clifford was awarded an Australian Society of Author's mentorship to help bring this debut novel - ALL THESE PERFECT STRANGERS - to fruition. To be fair to those who have read it and are finding the idea that this is a debut novel hard to believe, she has form. Shortlisted for the UK Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger, Clifford won the Ned Kelly / S.D. Harvey Short Story Award and a Sisters in Crime Scarlet Stiletto. What she has now produced is an assured, clever and profoundly disconcerting psychological thriller.

In the manner of all slow burner, tightly controlled psychological suspense novels, ALL THESE PERFECT STRANGERS is beautifully crafted. Told from Pen's viewpoint it combines the tantalising prospect of an unreliable narrator, or a past too dreadful to be revealed. By taking the reader straight into the life and mind of young Pen Sheppard as she is about to leave her small hometown, her difficult mother and a fraught childhood behind, heading for University and life within the walls of a typical residential college, the reader is immediately dragged straight into a relationship with this character. And it's discomforting to know so little about somebody, and yet be so intimately involved.

The narrative itself switches between the present of life in the College as she sets out to build a new life, start again, move on from a secret that nobody needs to know about and the alternative present of her "other life" where she is under the care of a psychiatrist - dealing with something from her University days that possibly has longer term and more deep seated elements behind it. As she tentatively makes friends, and the group settle into life in College, they party and they get to know each other - exactly as you'd expect from people this age. Then things implode with a series of attacks on the campus, and a dead student who may or may not have succumbed to a dreadful accident.

An exploration of truth, and presentation, ALL THESE PERFECT STRANGERS really does throw harsh lights on the perception of teenage life. The hesitancy with which the truth of Penn's background is revealed matches beautifully with her personality. The shakiness of the quickly formed friendships is as revealing as the way that edifices start to crumble. The good and bad start to reveal themselves (and it's not all bad), all of which exactly as you'd expect of a group of "perfect strangers" thrust into close proximity, the tension heightened by the threat of an unknown attacker. In this instance even the use of "perfect" in the title is exquisitely nuanced. Are they "perfect" people or will they always be "perfect strangers", is what you see really what you get, or are the persona's they have all constructed as deep and difficult as that which Pen hides behind?

It is a slow burner though, and you may start out profoundly confused about what's going on and why, but it is a very short trip from there to not able to put it down territory. As you'd expect from something this complex, layered, and confronting not everything is wrapped up in a neat bow, as it most definitely should never be. There's so much in ALL THESE PERFECT STRANGERS that is open to interpretation that it's only right that the reader is likely to be left with as many questions as answers.

I have been wondering how to review this book and I am having some difficulty doing so.

Pen Sheppard starts University. I can imagine her there: lots of young people, basic accommodation, lots of drinking, casual sex, some students who are popular and some who are not. She has a past that she is trying to hide but things keeping happening around her, murders, mostly.

I found myself a bit confused by the story. There were a lot of characters to get your head around, and I was trying to figure out how they all fitted in with Pen. She clearly has a dysfunctional upbringing and some mental health issues as well. Reading this book was a little like reading someone's diary (ironic, all things considered) - not all that descriptive, just the facts as she sees them, and I found myself not getting very emotionally involved with the book, generally.

Very hard to categorise, really.

It was an interesting book, not my cup of tea, but give it a go, it might be yours.

With thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for this ARC, in exchange for an honest review.

(I received a free copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.)

You don’t have to believe in ghosts for the dead to haunt you.
You don’t have to be a murderer to be guilty.
Within six months of Pen Sheppard starting university, three of her new friends are dead. Only Pen knows the reason why.
College life had seemed like a wonderland of sex, drugs and maybe even love. The perfect place to run away from your past and reinvent yourself. But Pen never can run far enough and when friendships are betrayed, her secrets are revealed. The consequences are deadly.

Unreliable narrators were the big hit for a number of books in recent memory and this one is no different. Despite a few minor flaws, I think this really nailed the intent and atmosphere that the author was going for.

The biggest compliment I can give a novel like this is to praise the atmosphere that the author has created. All the way through the book, I was never quite sure about the guilt or innocence of Pen, and that imbalance all the way through kept me guessing - as a good psychological thriller should.

The characters - for the most part - were well-developed and intriguing. As previously mentioned, Pen was a real strength in this story and getting to know her life - at least, from her perspective - really drew me into the plot.

The portrayal of life on a university campus is realistic enough. First year students totally consumed with the wild life - alcohol, drugs, parties...all added a real sense of place to the story, as well as a level of authenticity to those characters.

Finally, the mystery itself. Layer upon layer of misdirection, deceit, betrayal, and twists and turns keep this story fresh and exciting all the way through. The final revelation is shocking and surprising - I am sure there were people who guessed the ending before they got there, but I was pleased to say that I was hooked and then surprised at the end. And that is a nice treat for someone who reads a lot of crime/mystery novels.

Paul
ARH