FAMILIES. SOMETIMES THEY’RE A BLOODY NIGHTMARE . . .

Life with the Radleys: Radio 4, dinner parties with the Bishopthorpe neighbours and self-denial. Loads of self-denial. But all hell is about to break loose. When teenage daughter Clara gets attacked on the way home from a party, she and her brother Rowan finally discover why they can’t sleep, can’t eat a Thai salad without fear of asphyxiation and can’t go outside unless they’re smothered in Factor 50.

With a visit from their lethally louche Uncle Will and an increasingly suspicious police force, life in Bishopthorpe is about to change. Drastically.

I’m not one to research books before I review them. I much prefer to dive straight in to page one and let the text do the talking. Thinking back I do remember a suggestion that I would not like the subject of this book but having read the synopsis above I couldn’t see a problem. After all, many people have reactions from spicy food and bright sunshine.

So I picked up The Radleys and started reading what I found was a gentle, humorous story featuring a middle class family and their neighbours in a North Yorkshire village. Gentle and humorous until Clara was attacked.

The penny then dropped and I realised what the genre was. Definitely one that I had no desire to read but having got that far I was not going to give up. Also, to my embarrassment, I was rather enjoying it. The humour continued and despite the family’s predilections I was invested in the strong characters.

Matt Haig is an accomplished writer producing text that is easy to follow. The story is told in the third person with short chapters, usually told from the perspective of one character, which gives them an opportunity to try to justify their actions. Between chapters we get frequent references to a work called The Abstainers Handbook.

Haig includes the full gamut of the genre bringing in most, if not all, of the features one would expect. The violence is at times gory but described in a tongue in cheek way.

Most of our reviews are on new books by emerging writers so it was a little different to review a book initially published in 2010 and reissued in 2024 to tie in with the release of the Sky Cinema dramatization. No doubt the new cover showing the big smiles of Damian Lewis and his film family will boost sales.

I deliberately haven’t named the genre in this review so if you want to read the book you can get the same experience that I had. Alternatively if you want to know the clues are there to be seen.

I have to knock off a star for the subject matter but in a strange way I enjoyed The Radleys so I have awarded four stars. Does this mean that I want to read more of this type? Definitely not!

Matt Haig writes both fiction and non-fiction. This includes the novels The Humans, How to Stop Time and The Midnight Library, which has been a number one Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. A major film of his novel The Radleys is released in 2024. He has also written a number of children’s books including A Boy Called Christmas, which became a major feature film, and most recently the non-fiction book for adults, The Comfort Book.