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by Jennie Godfrey
"We'll make a list. A list of all the people and things we see that are suspicious. And then… we'll investigate them."
'What if we decided to try and find him?'
'What on earth are you on about?' she said. 'How are we going to catch the Yorkshire Ripper, when the police haven't even managed to?'
I sighed. Her questioning my ideas was a recent and unwelcome element to our friendship. But it was a valid point. How would we catch him? We needed some sort of plan, a way of gathering clues and putting them into order.
I thought about what the policeman had said about structure, and then about Aunty Jean and her notebook, and the idea I had hardened like toffee. I knew exactly what we needed to do.
'We'll make a list,' I said. 'A list of the people and things we see that are suspicious.
And then ... And then we'll investigate them.'
The List of Suspicious Things is a tender and moving coming of age story about family, friendship and community. Sometimes the strongest connections are found in the most unlikely of places.
The Forgotten Book Club Reading list
Here are the books listed in The Forgotten Book Club : One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey The Collected Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker The Bee Sting by Paul Murray Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwo...
-kim.kovacs
"A 12-year-old girl determines to unmask a serial killer in this extravagantly ambitious story of small-town Britain in 1979....Imaginative, impressive, and illuminating." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The real murders that are the basis for Godfrey's coming-of-age historical mystery are never trivialized here, and her characters are written with depth and richness. Miv learns lessons that readers will wish they could shield her from, but there is a redemptive arc." ―Library Journal
"What could be more magical than a writer who can flip from hilarity to darkness and back on the same page? Jennie Godfrey does this and more in The List of Suspicious Things, all told in a voice that is as authentic as it is unforgettable." ―Jenny Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Good Morning America Book Club pick Pineapple Street
"The List of Suspicious Things somehow manages to be heartwarming yet heartbreaking, a story of innocence lost that will make you feel innocent again, and beautifully nostalgic while being an unflinching portrait of the past. I loved it." ―Tracy Sierra, author of Nightwatching
This information about The List of Suspicious Things 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.
Jennie Godfrey was raised in West Yorkshire in a mill-working family and her debut novel, The List of Suspicious Things, was inspired by her childhood there in the 1970s. In 2020, Jennie gave up her corporate career to build a life around books. She is now a writer and part-time bookseller who lives, and writes, in the Somerset countryside.
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