Today I’m taking part in the blog tour for The Daves Next Door. My review is written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the blog tour and to Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

A disillusioned nurse suddenly learns how to care.

An injured young sportsman wakes up find that he can see only in black and white.

A desperate old widower takes too many pills and believes that two angels have arrived to usher him through purgatory.

Two agoraphobic men called Dave share the symptoms of a brain tumour, and frequently waken their neighbour with their ongoing rows.

Separate lives, running in parallel, destined to collide and then explode.

Like the suicide bomber, riding the Circle Line, day after day, waiting for the right time to detonate, waiting for answers to his questions: Am I God? Am I dead? Will I blow up this train?

Shocking, intensely emotive and wildly original, Will Carver’s The Daves Next Door is an explosive existential thriller and a piercing examination of what it means to be human … or not.

Review:

Will Carver’s writing is completely unique and I love it. He really makes the reader work and it took me a while to figure out where it was going, but he is so skilled in asking us questions, examining our beliefs and writing about current issues in a way that really makes us think about them. We’re told early on that our narrator might be God or he might be a terrorist, which is one example of how different this novel is – and I was intrigued to find out more about them. 

The novel centres around a group of characters who each live very different lives and have very different personalities. I love the way that Carver describes them, often using dark humour. I felt completely engaged in their lives and I even had a favourite (as Carver at one point suggests I might) and I was keen to see how their lives would come together. 
The chapters in The Daves Next Door are very short and this makes it very fast paced and tense. It is very well plotted, as throughout the novel, Carver drops hints as to what is to happen, which left me on edge and very intrigued the whole time I was reading

The Daves Next Door is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: