They've kept busy - Aina with her garden, her jigsaw, her music; Whitney with his sculptures and maps - but something is not right. Literary Review 'Unputdownable … An extraordinary book … as insightful and as premonitory as Orwell’s 1984’ Litro --_ Not all that is hidden is lost. Wondering whether this is a hero story, how does one effectively define a hero – and can you be your own hero? But although the underlying mystery and sense of threat is enough to keep us engaged and turning pages, the narrative eventually becomes overreliant on the deliberate withholding of information.

Their lives revolve around a pill clock that dispenses pills every 8 hours to keep them alive on the island. Whitney’s obeisance to the regime is particularly perplexing, most especially in being entirely unexamined. pieces of advice you received as you embarked on writing Metronome , and can you tell us a bit about how you signed with your agent, Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown? As Aina starts to suspect that Whitney has known this all along, the trust between them evaporates and she starts plotting how to make a journey longer than the 8-hour window between pills. Not to be confused with the former Labour politician and novelist of sorts, Curtis Brown Prize-winning author Tom Watson debuts with Metronome, and readers that were impressed by Francine Toon’s chilling Pine or the tense uncertainty of Emma Stonex’s The Lamplighters might enjoy this.Marooned and dependent on the land around them and each other as a punishment for a crime which we are told about piece by piece, as the story unfolds. The descriptions of the landscape and Aina and Whitney’s relationship as it begins to break down are so well and subtly described. We are not responsible for the republishing of the content found on this blog on other Web sites or media without our permission. We are treated to the geography of the island, the topography of ‘The Limits’ (aka ‘The Heights’) and its geology. And of course, while they have space to roam and freedom to establish their own routines, they are bound to this pill clock that sits at the heart of their croft, dispensing these life-saving pills at eight-hour intervals.

They have to remain close to their croft due to a biometric clock that dispenses pills that they must take every eight hours to ensure their survival. There is little explanation of what has happened in society for restrictions on having children or why there is such a harsh punishment for breaking the rules.

How well readers respond to this novel will depend on how far they are prepared to tolerate an accumulating fuzziness around the facts. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. PS: I received a digital copy of this book at my request, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. She is desperate to learn the fate of their son, Max, and fears her husband may be keeping this knowledge to himself. I thought it was interesting that their names weren’t immediately obvious as to who was who, just removed enough from perhaps a more familiar set of names.

Tom Watson skilfully creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, not only in the tiny croft itself but in this bleak, harsh, lonely existence Whitney and Aina are sentenced to indefinitely. The sense of beauty of the island’s rugged landscape becomes lost with everyday living, time, and experience. When Billy can’t find the informant, he wonders if Kate is secretly harboring her, since the two grew close during Kate's weeks undercover. I enjoyed reading this, it’s a story on it’s own but I’d recommend it for fans of Lost (where the repetitive activity may or may not actually mean anything). His imagining of the sparse and chilly beauty of the island, together with the exiles’ thwarted attempts to make creative sense of both their fate and their surroundings, should make for an engrossing and memorable reading experience.The mechanics of their world are calibrated to a male viewpoint, and Whitney to some extent is complicit with that.