The couple next door by shari lapena
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Bookworm’s Fantasy! I hope you’re all doing well. Today I’m going to be posting my review of Shari Lapena’s novel, ‘The Couple Next Door.’ I really enjoyed every single page, and I just had to review it for you! So, keep reading to discover my thoughts…
** TRIGGER WARNING ** Contains scenes of a sexual nature, references to acts of physical violence and abduction/kidnapping, and references to various mental illnesses.
‘The Couple Next Door’ was a Sunday Times Bestseller, and was labelled as “The most talked-about thriller of the year [2016].” It is Shari Lapena’s debut thriller novel, and was released in July 2016. Her latest novel, ‘A Stranger In The House,’ is due to be released on the 27th July 2017. Lapena was a lawyer and an English teacher, before she turned to writing fiction. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
It received much positive praise, for example from The Times: “Shari Lapena furnishes a clever array of motives and suspects,” and Metro: “Lapena leads us on a cunningly plotted cat-and-mouse trail […] building a horribly queasy portrait of a marriage under terrific strain.” Many fellow authors also praised the nov
Interview with Shari Lapena, Author of The Couple Next Door
One summer night, Anne and Marco Conti’s new baby, Cora, mysteriously disappears from her crib while her parents carouse at a dinner party next door. What starts out as every parent’s worst nightmare leads to growing scrutiny from the police, the couple’s mounting desperation, and eventually, suspicion within the family’s inner circle. What really happened to toddler Cora? The Couple Next Door is a taut, psychological thriller that sweeps you from your feet and doesn’t let you go. Book Club Babble is pleased to interview its storyteller Shari Lapena.
Kate Newton: First off let me say I can’t remember reading a book as fast as I did this one. I finished it in three days, which is a testament to how it grabs the reader and doesn’t allow go! Can you tell us how you first got the idea for The Couple Next Door?
Shari Lapena: I was trying to come up with an idea for a thriller, and I knew I wanted it to be close to abode. I’m not one to study spies and so on. One day the idea just popped into my head—what if a babysitter cancelled and left a couple in the lurch at the last minute? What would they do? Would they lea
I didn’t know anything about the plot of The Couple Next Door when I picked it up. If I had done, I would not have read it. And that would have been a huge mistake as it is a BRILLIANT thriller. You see, this book centres around a baby being kidnapped…
I have two little boys so if I ever come across a plot summary that involves danger to children, I tend not to read the book – it’s just something way too scary to even contemplate for me. On reflection – that is perhaps why I had such a visceral reaction to The Couple Next Door: although my heart was in my mouth, I just couldn’t stop reading it.
Opening sentence: Anne can feel the acid churning in her stomach and creeping up her throat; her head is swimming.
My worst nightmare
Set in an affluent suburb of New York, Anne and Marco Conti are invited to their next door neighbours’, Cynthia and Graham’s for an intimate dinner party. They make the (unforgivable, in my opinion) decision to leave their 6-month old daughter Cora at home ALONE in her cot. They bring the baby monitor and check on her every half hour. However, when they return home, they find the front door open
Inside the Success of ‘The Couple Next Door’
When Pamela Dorman acquired Shari Lapena’s thriller The Couple Next Door in the fall of 2015, there were strikes against the novel. While Dorman loved the book, a twisty tale about a couple whose baby goes missing from their upstate New York home, it was part of an incredibly crowded subgenre of psychological suspense novels vying to capture the readers of megahits Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. The novel’s Canadian author was also an unknown quantity in the U.S. (where the book would serve as her debut).
Now The Couple Next Door has become a main stay on the bestseller list, having sold more than 500,000 copies across all formats. The team at Viking, where Dorman’s eponymous imprint is housed, said the novel, released in hardcover in August 2016, was helped along by the things that, in industry parlance, make up a book’s “package”—namely its title, jacket, and cover copy.
The jacket, which went through nearly 50 iterations, initially featured two people, since the book’s title refers to a couple. The final version, which shows the silh
30 May Book Review: “The Couple Next Door” by Shari Lapena
Posted at 10:58h in Psychological thriller by Clare3 Comments
I picked up “The Couple Next Door” because sometimes you just need a twisty thriller to get your heart racing. I read it mostly in the evenings after work, when I needed something to distract me from the daily grind. I had high hopes for this one, given all the buzz about its shocking twists and turns.
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What’s it about?
“The Couple Next Door” kicks off with a young couple, Anne and Marco Conti, heading to a dinner party next door, leaving their six-month-old daughter, Cora, alone at home. They’ve got the baby monitor with them and check on her every half hour, but their worst nightmare comes true when they return to find Cora missing. Panic ensues, and the police, led by Detective Rasbach, get involved.
As the investigation unfolds, we learn that Anne has been struggling with postpartum depression, and Marco is in financial hot water. The couple’s story comes under scrutiny, with the media portraying them as negligent parents. Relationships with their neighbors, especial