A suicide bomber is cycling the Circle Line searching for the right moment to detonate his fully packed vest. Two men named Dave seem to share the same symptoms of a brain tumor. A nurse trying to learn how to care again after feeling fully deceived and unable to properly focus on her work. And there are more characters waiting to be discovered in The Daves Next Door by Will Carver published by Orenda Books. Like, for instance, an injured young sportsman, or a old lonely widower. Characters excentric enough to meet during your commuting time - ok, except the Daves which may be a bit extra anyway - and I appreciated how normal is their special breed. Humans are not born to be a copy-paste of one another, anyway.
Their fate is randomly intertwined and the subsequent meditation about fate and human destiny overlaps the original psychological thriller plot. The story is told backwards, starting from 2023, looking back at the events that took place during one July in 2022.
The time span is relatively long enough to allow both the action and the reflective thread. Both sides are perfectly balanced and complete each other, having as result an original prose and literary approach. I´ve only read another book by Carver before, but The Daves Next Door appealed to me on a higher string because of the complexity of the topics as well as the original interpretation.
In the end, there is a longing for a different world that remains at the end of the book. I am rarely reading books set in the future and I avoid too much philosophy in books featuring terrorists but this book is my notable exception. It defies categorizations and literary limits and it is enough to convince me that a good book is after all has only one label - that of a good book.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered as part of the blog tour, but the opinions are, as usual, my own
Thanks for the blog tour support x
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for having me!
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