The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford

This is not a thriller you might pick up at the airport prior to a flight.  But you should!  Although of course it depends what you like to read.  I don't read classic literature much.... but again, I don't read "airport thrillers" either.  So perhaps it's a mystery as to why I acquired and read this short novel (200+ pages).

The first thing to say is that this book has a very unreliable narrator and sometimes that makes a read very interesting indeed.  We know at the beginning of the book that this narrator has lost his wife to her "bad heart", and a good friend to a broken heart...... there are several deaths in this book, accidents, suicides, health?  Well, one thing is for sure, none of them are murders.  But that is the only sure thing in the entire read, for as the narrator is so unreliable, he weaves a tale of Gothic proportions, and you may find that from page to page you can't believe a word of it.  You should, though, because in  between the lies characters tell each other, and the unreliability of the narrator's memory (perhaps), there are truths to be untangled, and people's lives to be played with.

This is the story of four friends, who meet at the turn of the 20th century in a spa town in Europe, and remain in each others company for nine years.  It's only as you read on, you find that one or all of them are not as first described, none of them are likeable and there are secrets a-plenty.  Eventually they are all revealed, but you will be half way through before the pennies start to drop!

Despite it's "of the time" language (written in 1905 and published in 1915), this is a clever book, and a real page turner.  But ...... keep your wits about you at all times, as secrets and lies are revealed, then changed, then dismissed.