(Penguin, $37)
As you take a few deep breaths and recover from all the commotion of Christmas, you might find yourself reflecting on the nature of family and why some of your dear relatives insist on being so strange.
The Promised World is a book about the complexity of familial relations that will, hopefully, make any oddness in your own clan seem relatively mild. And conveniently, as the warm weeks of summer stretch out ahead of you, it is also a suspenseful and gripping read that will keep you glued to your deckchair until you’ve unravelled the mysteries contained within.
The Promised World is the tale of a set of fraternal twins, Lila and Billy Cole, who share an unusually close bond. The story begins with tragedy, however, when Billy commits “suicide by police” and Lila finds she no longer has any way of making sense of the world without her twin brother.
As she struggles to understand Billy’s motives, Lila is forced to confront facts about her deeply buried past. Also drawn into this journey of discovery are Lila’s placid and trusting husband, her brother’s estranged widow and the three devastated children Billy left behind.
This is the fifth novel from US author Lisa Tucker, who wrote the bestseller The Cure for oodern Life in 2008. Lisa is a scholar of both maths and literature and she explores the differing mindsets of these two schools of thought through Lila and her husband Patrick, who are distinguished English and maths professors respectively.
While Lila must learn that she cannot rely on stories and imagination alone to cope with life, Patrick realises that he must leave the comfort of his world of facts and formulas in order to rescue his wife from her spiral of despair. Meanwhile, Billy’s widow Ashley battles hopelessly to protect her offspring from the family curse and the children must piece together the truth about who their father really was.
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