Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn, 2012
★ 4.15 from 3.6m ratings on Goodreads
A marriage goes wrong in a Missouri river town, and every account of it is suspect. Read it for the voice, the fury, and the cool-eyed dread. A cool, satirical voice carries you through a marriage story full of dread, sharp turns and uneasy fascination.
Feels like dread, wonder and serenity. About love, freedom and death.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy unreliable narrators, domestic unease and a thriller that keeps shifting under your feet. Be warned that many readers find the central couple deeply unlikeable and the pacing slow, and some are repelled by its coldness.
Why read it
It gives you a sharp, satirical look at a marriage under pressure, with a voice that stays unsettling long after the plot turns.
A page from the book
The compliment that quietly tells a woman what she is not allowed to be.
There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”) What readers say
Readers are split: many found the twisty thriller addictive, surprising, and darkly fun, while others were bored, frustrated, or repelled by the unlikeable couple and slow pacing. Some felt conflicted, gripped yet disgusted.
Gillian Flynn.Gillian Flynn was a longtime Entertainment Weekly critic before publishing novels; she wrote the screenplay for David Fincher’s 2014 adaptation of Gone Girl.
Books that feel like this
The Help
Kathryn Stockett, 2009
Three women in 1960s Mississippi quietly collect the stories white families never expected to be told.
More by Gillian Flynn
Το κορίτσι που εξαφανίστηκε
Gillian Flynn, 2012
Αιχμηρά αντικείμενα
Gillian Flynn, 2012
A reporter returns to the small town she fled, sent to cover two missing girls, and finds her own family waiting with its teeth bared.
Sharp Objects
Gillian Flynn, 2006
A damaged Chicago reporter goes home to cover a small town's violence and finds her own family waiting.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Gone Girl for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy unreliable narrators, domestic unease and a thriller that keeps shifting under your feet. Be warned that many readers find the central couple deeply unlikeable and the pacing slow, and some are repelled by its coldness.
- What is Gone Girl like?
- A cool, satirical voice carries you through a marriage story full of dread, sharp turns and uneasy fascination. Feels like dread, wonder and serenity. About love, freedom and death.
- What should I read after Gone Girl?
- If you liked Gone Girl, try The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins), A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle) and Credence (Penelope Douglas).
A taste of the feed
A home you can't stop looking at, even though it hurts.
I lived at number twenty-three Blenheim Road for five years, blissfully happy and utterly wretched. I can’t look at it now. That was my first home. Not my parents’ place, not a flatshare with other students, my first home. I can’t bear to look at it. Well, I can, I do, I want to, I don’t want to, I try not to. Every day I tell myself not to look, and every day I look. I can’t help myself, even though there is nothing I want to see there, even though anything I do see will hurt me.
The Girl on the Train · Paula Hawkins
The moment a familiar body becomes something no myth has a name for.
The wild colors of her clothes became muted, whitened. The pudding-bag shape stretched, lengthened, merged. And suddenly before the children was a creature more beautiful than any Meg had even imagined, and the beauty lay in far more than the outward description. Outwardly Mrs. Whatsit was surely no longer a Mrs. Whatsit. She was a marble-white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen.
A Wrinkle in Time · Madeleine L'Engle
When old neglect finds a fresh place to hurt.
I lock my jaw, swallowing the needles in my throat. Over all the years of nannies and boarding schools and summer camps where I was kept busy and raised by anyone but them, I’d found little pain in anything my parents did anymore. But it seems there are still parts of me to hurt.
Credence · Penelope Douglas
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