Toby leads a normal, happy life. He’s in his late 20s, he has a good job working in a museum as their PR, and he has a lovely girlfriend, Melissa.

And then, suddenly, one night he is brutally attacked in his own flat. He suffers from a terrible head injury and he goes into hospital to recover. His memory is significantly impaired, and his personality seems to change a bit: for the first time ever, he is bad-tempered and angry. All to be expected from such a traumatic ordeal, he is reassured by his doctors.

Toby is an only child and he hears from his cousins (who he thinks of as siblings as they were very close as children) that his uncle, Hugo, is very unwell. When he’s ready, he goes with Melissa to stay with Hugo for a while.

He has happy memories of long summer holidays with his family at Hugo’s large house and they all seem to having a nice time. Until they find a skull in the wych elm in the garden.

Who is it? How long has it been there? And how did it get there?

It forces Toby to question everything he has ever known about his happy childhood and teenage years, his family, and, most of all, himself. A hard task with for someone with a patchy memory.

I enjoyed The Wych Elm. I thought it had been heavily influenced by Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (its writing style, the novel’s character construction, lexical choices, syntax, themes, images, etc etc) but it has more of a crime-focus. It’s shorter than The Goldfinch so we don’t get as far into the psyche of our unreliable narrator.

It’s a really really great read, and I highly recommend it!

The Wych Elm was published by Viking on 21st February 2019.

My copy was kindly sent to me (on my request) by the publisher to review.