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How to Kill Your Family: THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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How to Kill Your Family also takes the reader on a psychological journey of sorts. The novel’s protagonist, 28-year-old Grace Bernard, sets off on a mission to eliminate all members of her family with an end-goal of seeking revenge on her father, millionaire businessman and stereotypical playboy who abandoned her and her mother as a baby.

What. A. Book. Huge thank you to @boroughpress and @netgalley for my copy! How to Kill Your Family is hilarious, dark, gripping - it is at some points completely batshit and it’s one of the best things I’ve read this year. This smart revenge comedy is told through the eyes of the Villanelle-esque anti-hero Grace Bernard... Chilling, but also laugh-out-loud funny. Another corker of a debut' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH How To Kill Your Family is a fantastic read for anyone who loves dark humour. It’s fun to find yourself anticipating the details of the next murder as she goes through them all and I found myself delighting in how clever she was when planning each one. By the end I was rooting for her to not just get out of jail for the one murder she didn’t commit but to fulfill her plan despite how awful she is. The round-up:

I spent my 20s enjoying journalism but also knowing ‘I have slightly stumbled into this’. I knew lots of journalists, my dad was a journalist. I did it without thinking about it. And then I thought, ‘I don’t really know where I’m gonna go with this, because I’m not my dad ...’” She left journalism aged 33, to write Jog On and says that writing the book “felt like the beginning of my life”.

The story in How To Kill Your Family is fairly simple – we start off with Grace in Limehouse Prison for a murder she actually didn’t commit retelling the tales of some murders she did commit. It sounds like a really good premise and one that could have been executed so much better. Ironic twists and caustic commentary on everything from liberal guilt to the consumerist con that is “selfcare” sharpen this debut novel’ OBSERVER If now I can't even trust a nice pink cover with a girl and a shovel, I don't know what I can trust anymore. A funny, compulsive read about family dysfunction and the media’s obsession with murder’ SUNDAY TIMES STYLEAmidst the chaos of the calculated revenge plot are flashes of humour and Grace’s hilarious but true observations about the mundanity and bizarreness of life. It is a surprisingly uplifting story in places and while I never felt that her victims deserved their ultimate fates, Grace’s certainty and confidence was almost able to convince me of the necessity of her deeds. Grace Bernard is a thoroughly unlikeable person. Single-minded to the point of obsession about her plan to exact revenge, she freely exploits other people’s vulnerabilities to get what she needs. .

The ending broke my heart a little, but I didn’t feel like it affected my enjoyment of the book at all. In fact, I found myself racing to the end to digest all the information. We meet Grace in prison. But as rings true throughout the novel as a whole, she is there for reasons we later discover are far more complicated than would be contained in a straightforward murder – arrest – imprisonment plot.

Ironically, Grace was in jail for a murder she did not commit, yet she was never charged for the multiple murders that she did commit. She plans with extreme precision and executes these plans with ease and no regrets. It is only on reflection that I realise just how vile her deeds were. While I was absorbed in her world, the violence and immorality of her acts was camouflaged by her planning, precision and rationalisation. Grace is clearly intelligent for example— she comes up with ingenious ways to kill her relatives without leaving any trail. Yet she completely misreads the character of her cell-mate in prison. She is scathing about wealthy people with their expensive tastes in clothing, wine, and houses yet after her mother’s death she was raised by a high-income couple who taught her to enjoy the finer things in life. So Grace has benefited from a similar privileged life that she criticises other people for enjoying. Grace has been planning her outrageous plot since she was teenager, working her way through her own very bleak to do list…. How To Kill Your Family has been recommended to me many times and I am pleased to say I have finally joined the party! I've read a few novels with similar protagonists recently - the female serial killer with a dry sense of humour - but I was intrigued by the premise of this story and was interested to see how it would come together.

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