New Zealand Listener

People behaving very badly

To many, it might have seemed that Paula Hawkins, whose 2015 crime debut, The Girl on the Train, sold 23 million copies, was an overnight success. However, she’d written four commercially unsuccessful chick-lit novels under the pseudonym Amy Silver before that audacious pivot to crime.

In a strange reversal, the very elements that had turned readers off her chick-lit with the confusing, over-written in 2017 – it had, count ’em, 10 narrators; the critics savaged it.

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