does seem appropriate for the UK to have a prestigious UK-centric award, in the same way America has the National Book Award. The Man Booker Prize was once an opportunity to see the best literature published in a certain region. Its message now is more broad, and, personally, not totally on board with it. Even though Lincoln in the Bardo was one of my favorite books of last year, George Saunders is doing okay in terms of being critically lauded—not sure he needed the 2017 Man Booker Prize. But what do you think?

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost tothese dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.

Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she’d never return.

With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.

Beware a calm surface—you never know