Describing Melanie Finn’s work is a task that continuously eludes me. She documents humanity with so much authentic specificity that I fail miserably at summing up her work. 

What I can say is, that everything she writes sticks with me. Her leading women carry a brutal honesty in their internal voices. A quiet violence buzzes around their every thought. 

Her women challenge me, provoke me, and comfort me. The three things don’t seem to go together, but I think when a writer asks you to face honesty with no sugar on top, all three can co-exist. 

Pilgrim Jones finds herself happily following her husband to Africa for work. After nearly 20 years of what she thought was a happy marriage, he leaves her for another woman. 

For about half of the novel, I felt for Pilgrim. I revelled at the surprise of the betrayal. But about half way through, Melanie slices it all open and suggests that perhaps Pilgrim subconsciously turned the other way in her marriage in some deeper need to find herself unrelated to a man who had defined her for half of her life. 

Pilgrim finds her own mind unreliable as she navigates the dissolution of her marriage as well as tragic events that continue to unfold around her. 

Although the story is burning with danger and suspense, in the end you do realize that like all of Melanie’s work, the true thriller in the story is the question of self. Who are you really? What makes you, you? Is there such thing as good and bad? Should there be a price to pay for bad things even when you don’t mean them?

Life is both prickly and as delightful as the last hazy blue in the sky as the sun sets. As Melanie Finn suggestswith her title, that tenuous moment, that fleeting and almost imperceptible precipice between day and night, light and dark, good and evil, is the exact place that being alive takes place. 

If you are going to read any one of Melanie Finn’s books, start here. It is beautiful. It is arresting. It is memorable and worth it. THE GLOAMING will stay with you as you hope all great friends will stay.