Metronome: The 'unputdownable' BBC Two Between the Covers Book Club Pick

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Is the freedom for themselves or for someone else; do you give up your freedom for the sake of another? Best-selling author Mark Manson brings his signature no-nonsense wisdom back to the subject he started his career covering: relationships.

Not a bad debut though but if I had realised it was set in the future I wouldn’t have chosen it but that’s my mistake. I certainly found this a bleak novel, though that is to be expected given the circumstances that Aina and Whitney find themselves in. Interesting then that Watson’s proof title for the book was ‘Not All that Is Hidden is Lost’ referencing the Hemingway theory again, where hidden could be taken to mean the future and lost being loss in a physical and emotional way. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere (in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living)’. In Love Is Not Enough, Mark’s first Audible Original, you’ll follow five real people over the course of six months as they navigate f--ked up romantic situations, ranging from dating app addiction to marital affairs to absurd fantasies.

On the day Aina and Whitney are supposed to be collected for parole, nobody turns up; communication with the Warden becomes non-existent. When their crime is discovered they become social outcasts, condemned to serve a 12-year sentence of exile on a remote island in the north. For David Goggins, childhood was a nightmare--poverty, prejudice, and physical abuse colored his days and haunted his nights. Recently, I enjoyed Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee immensely, and I’ve been taking hits of Ted Chiang too. It is mysterious, intriguing, has more than a hint of the dystopian and examines the very depth of humanity which ticks a lot of boxes.

Sir Michael Caine knows a thing or two about gangs: whether that’s joining one as a kid, or playing them in movies for over 50 years. Whitney and Aina have been exiled to a lonely island cottage for disobeying societal rules, and are tethered in place by a forced reliance on pills, which are dispensed every 8 hours by a “pill clock”. Does he like what’s going on in the world (at the time of writing Metronome it was the pandemic; at the time of writing this review, there is war in the Ukraine). Michael Pollan, known for his best-selling nonfiction audio, including The Omnivores Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, conceived and wrote Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World as an Audible Original.Their prison does not have any locks or barred windows, but a house on an island and a lot of ocean… ah, and one more thing: every 8 hours they have to take a pill. Aina is planning an escape and works out a plan to enable her to gain an extra pill to allow her to venture further on the island, as she believes Whitney has been keeping secrets from her about what is out there. The story starts out really interesting, I liked reading the flashbacks to their lies before this, but the world sounds crazy! PS: I received a digital copy of this book at my request, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Just like the great Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale, this author doesn't inform the reader of how the world becomes what it is in this story.Lots of tension and suspense while not a lot was necessarily happening but it just let my imagination run riot and built the scene perfectly for when the action came later. To “maybe Witney is right and the warden was coming, and if Witney is right, max and Aina are now both doomed” and various other possibilities between.

Perhaps idealistic images of ‘Castaway’, ‘The Beach’ and ‘Desert Island Discs’ came rushing before I’d read Metronome.Metronome is an addictive and hugely compelling novel, I was totally enraptured by the characters and the plot. The rhythm of the book is what struck me -- Kate Bottley --This text refers to the paperback edition. In his debut novel, Tom Watson seems less interested in the wider political and social reality of his world than in the mundane detail of the characters’ lives and the bleakness of the landscape they inhabit, the emotional standoff that exists between them as a result of the traumatic severing of their previous existence. One memorable chapter sees Aina go for a swim, something to innocent that becomes heart-stoppingly stressful. The writing is atmospheric and depicts the hardship and monotonous existence while they eke out a living waiting for parole.