I have mixed feelings about the ending, but there’s no denying that this is a well-written and satisfying page-turner.

Whitney’s obeisance to the regime is particularly perplexing, most especially in being entirely unexamined. The plot started to get lost somewhere around the middle though and only really regained its footing in the final third only to end with such disappointing ambiguity.

Taut, unsettling and so completely charged with both tension and emotion, I found myself captivated by Metronome . However, they are coming to the end of their time there, ready for the Warden to come and take them back to society. In Whitney and Aina, Watson has created a couple whose secrets threaten both their present and their future and whose emotional limits are test. It is mysterious, intriguing, has more than a hint of the dystopian and examines the very depth of humanity which ticks a lot of boxes.

I can also see onto the island from a boat and so have the view of an outsider as well as having lived on the island for sometime. it carries magical symbolism, and in terms of mythological and religious importance, it is said to represent perfection and entirety. Katherine Mansfield also combines the senses and elements in her ‘Voices Of The Air’ poem using air, sound, sea, wind and music, ‘sighs’, ‘double notes’ and double basses, that appear in ‘rare’ moments. The events move along at a good pace - for life on an exile island, and soon all is revealed to be not as we, or they, were lead to believe.This book was just picked up by chance, because I had seen a review of it in the local press, but it has certainly made me think more deeply than the words on the page.

Much of the pleasure of my initial reading of this novel was driven by the desire to discover what had happened in the past and how the novel was going to end; consequently my reread was less satisfying. I played a game as a child once where you could only see two cms around you at any one time and you had to navigate blindly really through a maze. The cultural references – Giacometti, Copenhagen, the Vikings – indicate a world that is recognisably ours, and a background of accelerating climate change suggests the narrative is taking place in the near future.As days pass, Aina begins to suspect that their prison is part of a peninsula, and that Whitney has been keeping secrets.