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

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Metronome is everything that I want from a book, this is most certainly going to be amongst my top books of this year. Whitney and Aina and their former friends appear to remember a time before the invasive restrictions that have come to determine their lives and futures, yet they remain curiously, almost determinedly passive. However their supply drops have ceased and they are surviving off the land and the occasional shipwreck.

The author captures the pure desolation of the landscape, with the weather playing such a large part in the story. The specific episode discussing the book has not yet aired as of mid-May 2022, (NOTE: These are only available for listening in the United Kingdom) but you can watch for it in the list of Between the Covers episodes here.

Aina’s creator, Tom Watson, now billed by Bloomsbury as a literary star of 2022, is a graduate of University of East Anglia (UEA) in creative writing, where he won the Curtis Brown Prize. The author seems to want to say something without saying it but not even hinting at what it might be.

This is an example of a great synopsis that really gives a sense of the plot: unexplained events, suspicion within a marriage, and curiosity about what else might be out there.Metronome is an addictive and hugely compelling novel, I was totally enraptured by the characters and the plot. For this reader, at least, the vastness and profusion of plot holes and the relentlessly accelerating illogic that governs the final quarter of the novel explode any such necessary suspension of disbelief.

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. In his debut novel, Tom Watson seems less interested in the wider political and social reality of his world than in the mundane detail of the characters’ lives and the bleakness of the landscape they inhabit, the emotional standoff that exists between them as a result of the traumatic severing of their previous existence.Just like the great Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale, this author doesn't inform the reader of how the world becomes what it is in this story.