Discover Well-Read Black Girl Books and the projects reshaping publishing →

Book Summary and Reviews of Exit by Belinda Bauer

Exit by Belinda Bauer

Exit

by Belinda Bauer

  • Critics' Consensus (0):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • Published:
  • Feb 2021, 336 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

Belinda Bauer is "Britain's most original crime writer" (Crime Scene), one of the few authors in the genre to be longlisted for the Man Booker prize. Now she returns with a heart-pounding, heartbreaking, and often hilarious new crime novel in which it's never too late for life to go fatally wrong.

Felix Pink is retired. Widowed for more than a decade, a painfully literal thinker, he has led a life of routine and is, not unhappily, waiting to die a hopefully boring death. He occupies himself volunteering as an Exiteer―someone who sits with terminally ill people as they die by suicide, assisting with logistics and lending moral support, then removing the evidence so that family and friends are not implicated in the death. When Felix lets himself in to Number 3 Black Lane, he's there to perform an act of kindness and charity: to keep a dying man company as he takes his final breath.

But just fifteen minutes later Felix is on the run from the police―after making the biggest mistake of his life. Now his routine world is turned upside down as he tries to discover whether what went wrong was a simple mistake―or deliberate. Murder.

Belinda Bauer continues to redefine the boundaries of crime fiction, with a novel that is part murder mystery, part coming-of-old-age story―however short that future may be. With the compassion and dark humor of Jonas Jonasson and the twisted thriller plotting of Rear Window, Exit is a novel readers will not soon forget.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"[D]roll...Each distinctive character has a sense of humor sure to prompt belly laughs from the reader. Bauer knows how to entertain." - Publishers Weekly

"[D]arkly comic...A touching crime novel that explores the nature of life and death with heart and soul." - Kirkus Reviews

"Belinda Bauer's enjoyment of the complexity and unpredictability of human lives is contagious. Exit is pure guilty pleasure." - Thomas Perry, author of Eddie's Boy

"Bauer's unique trademark strengths make Exit quirky, charming, intensely human, important...and very suspenseful. I loved it." - Lee Child

This information about Exit was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Sally

Surprise!
So well done. Found myself thoroughly enjoying Felix's many blunders and wondering how it would turn out. The humor was a welcoming touch.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Belinda Bauer

Belinda Bauer is the award-winning author of seven previous novels that have been translated into twenty-one languages. She won the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Crime Novel of the Year for Blacklands, the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award for Rubbernecker, and the CWA Dagger in the Library Award for outstanding body of work. Her previous novel, Snap, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in Wales.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Exit, try these:

  • The Fortune Men jacket

    The Fortune Men

    by Nadifa Mohamed

    Published 2022

    About this book

    Based on a true event, an intimate and harrowing novel about the last man in Cardiff to be sentenced to death.

  • The Stranger Diaries jacket

    The Stranger Diaries

    by Elly Griffiths

    Published 2019

    About this book

    Death lies between the lines when the events of a dark story start coming true in this haunting modern gothic mystery, perfect for fans of Magpie Murders and The Lake House.

  • Little Deaths jacket

    Little Deaths

    by Emma Flint

    Published 2017

    About this book

    Inspired by a true story, Little Deaths, like celebrated novels by Sarah Waters and Megan Abbott, is compelling literary crime fiction that explores the capacity for good and evil in us all.

We have 10 read-alikes for Exit, but non-members are limited to three results. Join free to see the complete list of recommendations.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
When No One Else Will
by Amanda Skenandore
1940s Chicago nurse risks everything at an illegal women’s clinic during a high-profile trial of courage and sisterhood.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket
    Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young
    by Zayd Ayers Dohrn
    Son of Weather Underground radicals recounts life on the run and decades of revolutionary struggle.
  • Book Jacket
    The Jellyfish Problem
    by Tessa Yang
    A marine biologist rescues a Maine island menaced by a giant glowing jellyfish in this inventive debut.
  • Book Jacket
    Look What You Made Me Do
    by John Lanchester
    A propulsive tale of intergenerational tension and revenge from the Booker Prize nominee.
Who Said...

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Book
Trivia
  • Book Trivia

    Can you name the title?

    Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

Q S, S

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.