Web Only: What I'm Reading - July

IQ editor Claire Finlayson reveals ONE OF THE  bookS  currently restING on her bedside cabinet.

I’m halfway through Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife (Bloomsbury) and am nicely swallowed by its mix of quietly imploding tension and muscular characterisation. Perkins has always had a sharp eye for moral and emotional infirmities - she nailed twentysomething angst in her sassy short story debut Not Her Real Name (1996) and here, pricks smug, middle-class bombast with the same wry gaze. It’s a gripping portrait of a love-full marriage fatally scuppered by secrecy, the sense of impending doom leavened throughout by Perkins’ ripe wit.

It’s been seven years since her last novel. She’s been busy, see. Three kids will do that to you. But the same things that have kept Perkins from her laptop have added all the more life grit to her authorial voice.