What You Don’t Know About Me (a novella by Peter Crawley)
REVIEWED BY Ingrid Fear
While reading Peter Crawley’s What You Don’t Know about Me, I grew to understand what is meant by the term ‘an author’s voice’. Broadly speaking, this is the unique language employed by writers to tell their story; it is a combination of the words they use and the way they arrange them. From the first page, I lost myself to the author’s voice; a welcome distraction from the current gloom.
The novella – about a journalist, a young woman and a clandestine immigrant – centres on how we are prone to form opinions about people before we truly know them. The story opens in the early hours of Easter Friday near St Peter’s Hospital, where police discover the young immigrant hiding in a lorry, and concludes at the end of the summer in a manor house near Windlesham. In between, we are permitted a glimpse of what life can be like for many young clandestines.
As a Resilience Coach, I appreciate the value in recognising language, body language and behaviour, much as the young woman does in the story.
Connection, communication and the ability to empathise with other people’s emotions are equally important.
As one reviewer put it recently, ‘Mr Crawley has a knack for getting inside the heads of his characters and his readers and bringing a place to life so that you walk with them through the scenes as the book progresses’. Good writing comes alive in the mind of the reader, transporting us to unusual locations, compelling us to engage with characters we have never met and thrilling us with not only the actions of those characters, but also by challenging us to think how we might react in similar circumstances. Good books, like this one, toy with our sympathies.
I downloaded the novella free from the author’s website (www.peter-crawley.com), though it is also available to purchase in paperback through Amazon Books. Shorter than his previous novels, this is a gripping, fast-paced read that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. The ending will leave you breathless: I thoroughly recommend it.
Have you read a good book recently that you think we would enjoy and want to write a review? Please get in touch mary.hammond@community-life.co.uk