Metronome: The 'unputdownable' BBC Two Between the Covers Book Club Pick

Product Information

The location is not exactly specified but certain factors (they live in a croft (a Scottish farm dwelling), shipwrecks often have Nordic names, the use of an ancient Celtic counting system, a nearby permafrost indicates a northern locale, etc. I love dystopian thrillers and Metronome was a really intriguing book which stayed with me long after I put it down. Whitney’s obeisance to the regime is particularly perplexing, most especially in being entirely unexamined. Taut, unsettling and so completely charged with both tension and emotion, I found myself captivated by Metronome. There is a clock/timer which dispenses the pills they must take each day and again, there is the image of time ticking, counting down.

By taking the decision to have a child without obtaining official permission, Whitney and Aina are breaking the law. This gives an insight into the desperation of the parents, then the discovery and removal to remote Long Sky Croft. Taut, unsettling and so completely charged with both tension and emotion, I found myself captivated by Metronome . Things take an unexpected turn toward the end and the reader is left with a sense of both sorrow and hopeful joy. They are trapped by geography, and by an apparently poisoned environment: they each have to take a pill every eight hours that is only dispensed from a physical, unmovable, unfathomable structure in their crofting cottage.

You never really learn anything about the outside society so you have to just imagine a future population controlled civilization also subject to the poisonous effects of climate change. The piano is central to the discovery of their 'crime' and their subsequent banishment to the island and it is a clever reminder of the time that ticks by between their eight hourly doses of medication. I played a game as a child once where you could only see two cms around you at any one time and you had to navigate blindly really through a maze.

At various points I could see very different scenarios, and I worried that the back half: the explanation and possible resolution, would underwhelm or disappoint. Wondering whether this is a hero story, how does one effectively define a hero – and can you be your own hero? She last promoted PR packages within the Press Association before full-time motherhood allowed Barbara to pursue her interest in Creative Writing. I am honestly not sure what to say about this book- I have been left very confused and unsure about what actually happened in this novel.Interesting then that Watson’s proof title for the book was ‘Not All that Is Hidden is Lost’ referencing the Hemingway theory again, where hidden could be taken to mean the future and lost being loss in a physical and emotional way.