Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner

Published by Bloomsbury Raven

Available in All Good Bookshops and Online

What They Say

Helen has it all…

Daniel is the perfect husband.
Rory is the perfect brother.
Serena is the perfect sister-in-law.

And Rachel? Rachel is the perfect nightmare.

When Helen, finally pregnant after years of tragedy, attends her first antenatal class, she is expecting her loving architect husband to arrive soon after, along with her confident, charming brother Rory and his pregnant wife, the effortlessly beautiful Serena. What she is not expecting is Rachel.

Extroverted, brash, unsettling single mother-to-be Rachel, who just wants to be Helen’s friend. Who just wants to get know Helen and her friends and her family. Who just wants to know everything about them. Every little secret.

Masterfully plotted and utterly addictive, Greenwich Park is a dark, compelling look at motherhood, friendships, privilege and the secrets we keep to protect ourselves.

What I Say

If there is one thing guaranteed to get me to pick up a novel, it’s one where motherhood and parenting is involved. I was drawn to Greenwich Park because the idea of a world where the filtered facade presented to the world doesn’t match the fractured reality is something I am always fascinated reading about.

Helen, Daniel, Rory and Serena inhabit a world where they have never had to worry about money and are very comfortably off. Having met at Cambridge, the two couples have been inseparable. Following the death of her parents, Helen and Daniel now live in their former home in Greenwich Park which they are having renovated before their baby arrives. Having endured the trauma of losing babies before, Helen is understandably nervous about ensuring everything goes smoothly before the birth of their child. Rory is Helen’s brother, and with his glamorous and seemingly unflappable wife Serena, he now runs his father’s architectural practice along with Rory.

Serena is pregnant too, and although she and Rory have signed up to childbirth classes with Helen and Daniel, Helen finds herself on her own when they don’t show up. She has felt increasingly disconnected from Daniel who is spending more time at the office, lots of money on their renovations, and is receiving calls from the bank about remortgaging the house. While thinking of leaving the class, it is then that Rachel, bursts into the classroom and Helen’s life. Brash, vibrant, unapologetic and loud, Rachel is everything Helen isn’t, and although at first Helen might find this slightly refreshing, little by little she realises that somehow, everywhere she goes, Rachel seems to appear.

Helen’s friend Katie is a journalist who is covering a rape case where two privileged young white men are accused of raping a young woman, and initially I thought it was just part of the narrative to introduce Katie. However, as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that something similar happened when Helen, Rory, Daniel and Serena were at Cambridge, and that their involvement on that night means that they are now very much in danger of losing everything.

Rachel slithers her way into their lives and little by little she manages to get her feet firmly under the table in Helen and Daniel’s house with both of them too polite to ask her to leave. She eats all their food, leaves the house in disarray and has no qualms about making herself completely at home.

That is until an irate Helen who has been pushed to breaking point confronts Rachel on the night of her bonfire party, and she finally leaves them. Or so Helen believes – until the police arrive at her house with a lot of questions.

From that moment on, the fragile world that Helen, Daniel, Rory and Serena have been living in starts to crack and splinter, in ways they could never have imagined. Rachel’s disappearance is the catalyst to their lives unravelling, and suddenly the couples have to face the fact that they are far more involved in Rachel’s life than they ever thought possible.

Greenwich Park works so well as a novel because it manages to balance a fast paced and deliciously unpredictable plot with brilliantly in-depth and engaging characters. You understand how Helen is not only feeling isolated and vulnerable, but also that she has always felt she is the consolation prize throughout her life, overshadowed by the aloof and majestic Serena. Smug Rory and seemingly sensitive Daniel are not what they appear, and I loved the fact that their sense of almost untouchability due to their upbringing means that what happens to them is beyond their comprehension.

Did I always like them? No, but that for me is testament to Katherine’s writing, because the brilliant plot and my absolute need to know what has happened, and why Rachel came into their lives makes this novel one that is impossible to put down. Greenwich Park is an absorbing and intelligent novel which manages to do that very rare thing of having characters who we may dislike, but creates such a connection with them that means we are compelled to follow their stories right to the end.

I absolutely loved it – and you if you think it sounds heart stopping, just wait for those deliciously perfect last two lines!

Thank you so much to Emilie Chambeyron and Amy Donegan at Bloomsbury for my gifted copy.