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Gone Girl Paperback – April 22, 2014

by Gillian Flynn (Author)

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “mercilessly entertaining” (Vanity Fair) instant classic “about the nature of identity and the terrible secrets that can survive and thrive in even the most intimate relationships” (Lev Grossman, Time “One of the Best Books of the Decade”)—now featuring never-before-published deleted scenes

ONE OF TIME'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME, ONE OF CNN'S MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE, AND ONE OF ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY'S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE

ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Janet Maslin, The New York Times, People, Entertainment Weekly, O: The Oprah Magazine, Slate, Kansas City Star, USA Today, Christian Science Monitor

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages from Amy's diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer?

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Chicago Tribune, HuffPost, Newsday

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There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.
Highlighted by 9,675 Kindle readers
But there’s no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.
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Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it. I drank more and continued my mantra.
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From the Publisher

New York Magazine says, Gone Girl is a thriller with an insane twist and realistic take on marriage

The Boston Globe says, “Wickedly plotted & surprisingly thoughtful, a terrifically good read.”

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Absorbing . . . In masterly fashion, Flynn depicts the unraveling of a marriage—and of a recession-hit Midwest—by interweaving the wife’s diary entries with the husband’s first-person account.”—The New Yorker

“Ms. Flynn writes dark suspense novels that anatomize violence without splashing barrels of blood around the pages . . . Ms. Flynn has much more up her sleeve than a simple missing-person case. As Nick and Amy alternately tell their stories, marriage has never looked so menacing, narrators so unreliable.”—The Wall Street Journal

“The story unfolds in precise and riveting prose . . . even while you know you’re being manipulated, searching for the missing pieces is half the thrill of this wickedly absorbing tale.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Ice-pick-sharp . . . spectacularly sneaky . . . impressively cagey . . . Gone Girl is Ms. Flynn’s dazzling breakthrough. It is wily, mercurial, subtly layered and populated by characters so well imagined that they’re hard to part with.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“An ingenious and viperish thriller . . . Even as Gone Girl grows truly twisted and wild, it says smart things about how tenuous power relations are between men and women, and how often couples are at the mercy of forces beyond their control. As if that weren’t enough, Flynn has created a genuinely creepy villain you don't see coming. People love to talk about the banality of evil. You’re about to meet a maniac you could fall in love with.” —Jeff Giles, Entertainment Weekly

“An irresistible summer thriller with a twisting plot worthy of Alfred Hitchcock. Burrowing deep into the murkiest corners of the human psyche, this delectable summer read will give you the creeps and keep you on edge until the last page.”—People (four stars)

“It’s simply fantastic: terrifying, darkly funny and at times moving. . . . [Gone Girl is] her most intricately twisted and deliciously sinister story, dangerous for any reader who prefers to savor a novel as opposed to consuming it whole in one sitting.”—Michelle Weiner, Associated Press

“Gillian Flynn’s third novel is both breakneck-paced thriller and masterful dissection of marital breakdown. . . . Wickedly plotted and surprisingly thoughtful, this is a terrifically good read.”—The Boston Globe

“Gone Girl is that rare thing: a book that thrills and delights while holding up a mirror to how we live. . . . Through her two ultimately unreliable narrators, Flynn masterfully weaves the slow trickle of critical details with 90-degree plot turns. . . . Timely, poignant and emotionally rich, Gone Girl will peel away your comfort levels even as you root for its protagonists—despite your best intuition.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Gillian Flynn's barbed and brilliant Gone Girl has two deceitful, disturbing, irresistible narrators and a plot that twists so many times you'll be dizzy.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Flynn is a master manipulator, deftly fielding multiple unreliable narrators, sardonic humor, and social satire in a story of a marriage gone wrong that makes black comedies like The War of the Roses and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf look like scenes from a honeymoon. . . . It is, in a word, amazing.”—Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor

“Gone Girl [is] a thriller with an insane twist and an insidiously realistic take on marriage.”—New York

“Brilliantly constructed and consistently absorbing . . . The novel, which twists itself into new shapes, works as a page-turning thriller, but it’s also a study of marriage at its most destructive.”—The Columbus Dispatch

About the Author

Gillian Flynn is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Gone Girl, for which she wrote the Golden Globe–nominated screenplay; the New York Times bestsellers Dark Places and Sharp Objects; and a novella, The Grownup. A former critic for Entertainment Weekly, she lives in Chicago with her husband and children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Nick Dunne

The Day Of

When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.

I’d know her head anywhere.

And what’s inside it. I think of that too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy? The question I’ve asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?

My eyes flipped open at exactly six a.m. This was no avian fluttering of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said—in my face, first thing I saw. 6- 0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My life was alarmless.

At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-god self. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom curtains. Accusing: You have been seen. You will be seen.

I wallowed in bed, which was our New York bed in our new house, which we still called the new house, even though we’d been back here for two years. It’s a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of town. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would—and did—detest.

“Should I remove my soul before I come inside?” Her fi rst line upon arrival. It had been a compromise: Amy demanded we rent, not buy, in my little Missouri hometown, in her firm hope that we wouldn’t be stuck here long. But the only houses for rent were clustered in this failed development: a miniature ghost town of bank-owned, recession-busted, price-reduced mansions, a neighborhood that closed before it ever opened. It was a compromise, but Amy didn’t see it that way, not in the least. To Amy, it was a punishing whim on my part, a nasty, selfish twist of the knife. I would drag her, caveman-style, to a town she had aggressively avoided, and make her live in the kind of house she used to mock. I suppose it’s not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like. One of us was always angry. Amy, usually.

Do not blame me for this particular grievance, Amy. The Missouri Grievance. Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the Internet, blame people who use the Internet. I used to be a writer. I was a writer who wrote about TV and movies and books. Back when people read things on paper, back when anyone cared about what I thought. I’d arrived in New York in the late ’90s, the last gasp of the glory days, although no one knew it then. New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world—throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won’t kill us in the night. Think about it: a time when newly graduated college kids could come to New York and get paid to write. We had no clue that we were embarking on careers that would vanish within a decade.

I had a job for eleven years and then I didn’t, it was that fast. All around the country, magazines began shuttering, succumbing to a sudden infection brought on by the busted economy. Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don’t work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women’s hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was done. Three weeks after I got cut loose, Amy lost her job, such as it was. (Now I can feel Amy looking over my shoulder, smirking at the time I’ve spent discussing my career, my misfortune, and dismissing her experience in one sentence. That, she would tell you, is typical. Just like Nick, she would say. It was a refrain of hers: Just like Nick to . . . and whatever followed, whatever was just like me, was bad.) Two jobless grown-ups, we spent weeks wandering around our Brooklyn brownstone in socks and pajamas, ignoring the future, strewing unopened mail across tables and sofas, eating ice cream at ten a.m. and taking thick afternoon naps.

Then one day the phone rang. My twin sister was on the other end. Margo had moved back home after her own New York layoff a year before—the girl is one step ahead of me in everything, even shitty luck. Margo, calling from good ole North Carthage, Missouri, from the house where we grew up, and as I listened to her voice, I saw her at age ten, with a dark cap of hair and overall shorts, sitting on our grandparents’ back dock, her body slouched over like an old pillow, her skinny legs dangling in the water, watching the river flow over fish-white feet, so intently, utterly self- possessed even as a child. Go’s voice was warm and crinkly even as she gave this cold news: Our indomitable mother was dying. Our dad was nearly gone—his (nasty) mind, his (miserable) heart, both murky as he meandered toward the great gray beyond. But it looked like our mother would beat him there. About six months, maybe a year, she had. I could tell that Go had gone to meet with the doctor by herself, taken her studious notes in her slovenly handwriting, and she was teary as she tried to decipher what she’d written. Dates and doses.

“Well, f***, I have no idea what this says, is it a nine? Does that even make sense?” she said, and I interrupted. Here was a task, a purpose, held out on my sister’s palm like a plum. I almost cried with relief.

“I’ll come back, Go. We’ll move back home. You shouldn’t have to do this all by yourself.”

She didn’t believe me. I could hear her breathing on the other end.

“I’m serious, Go. Why not? There’s nothing here.”

A long exhale. “What about Amy?”

That is what I didn’t take long enough to consider. I simply assumed I would bundle up my New York wife with her New York interests, her New York pride, and remove her from her New York parents—leave the frantic, thrilling futureland of Manhattan behind—and transplant her to a little town on the river in Missouri, and all would be fine.

I did not yet understand how foolish, how optimistic, how, yes, just like Nick I was for thinking this. The misery it would lead to.

“Amy will be fine. Amy . . .” Here was where I should have said, “Amy loves Mom.” But I couldn’t tell Go that Amy loved our mother, because after all that time, Amy still barely knew our mother. Their few meetings had left them both baffled. Amy would dissect the conversations for days after—“And what did she mean by . . .”—as if my mother were some ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the tundra with an armful of raw yak meat and some buttons for bartering, trying to get something from Amy that wasn’t on offer.

Amy didn’t care to know my family, didn’t want to know my birthplace, and yet for some reason, I thought moving home would be a good idea.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Publishing Group; Reprint edition (April 22, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 422 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307588378
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307588371
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.17 x 0.98 x 7.98 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,525 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #217 in Murder Thrillers
- #794 in Suspense Thrillers
- #2,287 in Genre Literature & Fiction

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Gillian Flynn

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Gillian Flynn was the chief TV critic for ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY and now writes full-time. Her first novel SHARP OBJECTS was the winner of two CWA DAGGERS and was shortlisted for the GOLD DAGGER. Her latest novel, GONE GIRL, is a massive No.1 bestseller. The film adaptation of GONE GIRL, directed by David Fincher and starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, won the Hollywood Film Award 2014.

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Nickolas X. P. Sharps

That's How You Do It

Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2012

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I don't often read outside of my comfort zone. I love science fiction and I love fantasy and not much else holds my interest. Every once and a while though I'll take a risk and venture outside my safety bubble. GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn was recommended to me with infectious enthusiasm. It wasn't my usual cup of tea but the premise was perplexing and so I decided to give it a shot. WOW, I am so glad I did not let this one pass me by.

On the morning of Amy Dunne's fifth wedding anniversary she goes missing. As the investigation gets rolling evidence leads the police and the public to suspect the obvious: it's always the husband. There is more to the story than Nick Dunne will let on but does that necessarily mean he is to blame for the disappearance of his wife?

It's always the husband. Right? Maybe not...GONE GIRL is the best sort of book. This is the sort of novel that will challenge your preconceived notions. This is the sort of novel that will absorb you fully and not let you go until you flip the final page. Even then you are bound to continue mulling it over in your head. This is the sort of book that dominates your conscious, whether you're at work or school or whatever it is you people do. I don't take time to reflect on books as I read them. I just don't have the luxury. With GONE GIRL I was pausing every fifty pages or so to contemplate what it was that I had read. And even then I finished it in a few sittings. I got this book on a Tuesday and had finished it by Thursday night. At 400 pages and given the concerns of daily life that is no small feat.

So what makes GONE GIRL such an addictive book? For starters it is incredibly well written. From start to finish, GONE GIRL is a nearly flawless psychological thriller. The book is told from two perspectives, Nick and Amy's. Nick's POV picks up the day Amy goes missing and continues on with the investigation. Amy's POV is past-tense, told in the form of diary entries leading up to the disappearance. For the entirety of the novel Nick maintains his innocence, but he also confesses to a number of indiscretions. The entries from Amy's diary paint a very different picture of Nick, as well as a very different picture of Amy. Readers will experience the two falling in and out of love, the highs and lows of the marriage, from two perspectives that don't quite match up.

The characters of Nick and Amy are real people. At least that's how it feels. Flynn crafts remarkably authentic characters and utterly believable relationships. I developed genuine feelings for both leads, feelings that morphed and grew over the course of the novel. It's impossible not to care about these people. That doesn't mean they are necessarily likable. I've seen some complaints that they aren't "likable enough." Well yeah, that's true in a sense, because they are placed under a high intensity microscope. The deeper you look into someone the less you will find to like. But it goes both ways. The deeper you look into someone the more you can find to admire. I had anxiety over finishing the novel because I cared that much about these characters.

The ancillary characters are also well drawn. It takes no effort at all to picture these people and their motivations and their relationships. There is no shortage of suspects, even though all of the evidence seems to be pointing in one direction. It is enough to make you wonder how thoroughly the media influences perception. Everyone always assumes the husband is to blame but that's what we have been conditioned to believe.

GONE GIRL is a psychological thriller of the highest order. Hitchcock style. The suspense is almost unbearable. Horror movie directors need to take some freaking notes. This is how you do it. GONE GIRL is too involved for a movie but I would love to see it picked up and developed as a television mini-series. Even when I expected one twist I was still floored when my revelation came true. It's just that good. There is some very dark, very twisted stuff here but none of it is beyond the realm of belief. And that's what makes it so creepy. This could happen to you. It could happen to me. I really, really hope this doesn't happen to me. It just goes to show you, sometimes the most disturbing thing of all is not knowing someone half so well as you think.

Recommended Age: 17+
Language: Plenty.
Violence: Uh, wow I guess there really isn't any violence. But it is discussed.
Sex: No real sex here either, but there is discussion of sex. \

Nick Sharps
Elitist Book Reviews

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Susan

Interesting Psycho-Dynamics in Well-Written Fiction

Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2015

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My apologies for the verbosity. I don’t usually write such lengthy reviews, but my ambivalences seemed to require explanation.
Gone Girl reads like tabloid fiction, which is not a bad thing for Gillian Flynn because tabloid fiction sells, as the popularity of the book well illustrates. People love gossip, even though it’s gossip concerning fictional character celebrities. It’s why reality TV is so hot. If you love that stuff, you are not alone and you will love this book. I don’t. It was recommended to me for the interesting psycho-dynamics of the main characters.

I do love the author’s writing style. Her command of language, the dark humor and quick wit kept me reading. Most of the time, when she broke the rules, it was done with purpose and it worked. Her powerful, clever prose in the narrative was perfect for this sort of read. The dialogue was never pointless. The mystery of Amy missing was introduced early enough, and the clues the author carefully crafted were masterful. Amy knew Nick and Nick knew Amy, and each had a most distinctive voice.

The first half of this book was pure torture for me, slow and tedious. Multiple first person POV always slows the story down and creates an ebb and flow. It’s not my favorite technique. I want action and a forward momentum. You learn all the nuances and details about Amy and Nick, their relationship to each other and with others, and how they thought and felt about each other. I also don’t care for chick-lit or romance, but they are popular genres, which again leans to the popularity of this book.

The points in Part One could have been made with half the words. But that’s the price you pay for well-developed, multidimensional characters. Aside from the mystery, it was almost completely character development. This is going to sound like a contradiction: I’m not big on back story being at the front of the book, but with the dual points of view and the unreliable narrator elements, it all worked marvelously well for the story in the long run. The pace kicked up a few notches once we got out of Amy’s diary.

However, it’s worth repeating, I do feel the character development was overwritten, over dramatized. There was a tremendous amount of unnecessary repetition; words, sentences, phrases, paragraphs, rephrasing example after example. Too many times while reading, I told the author, “Enough already! You just said that. We’ve heard that one too many times. Do we really need to go over this again? Okay, you’ve made your point; can we just get on with the story?” (See how annoying that is. It doesn’t emphasize anything. It just grates.)

There has been a lot of talk about these characters. People have said there isn’t one likeable character in this book. The criticisms reinforce people’s intolerance of the mentally ill, the stigmatization we see. Margo; she is the most natural, down-to-earth character, and sane. Nick and Amy are sick, (aside from that they are likable). I do believe my empathy as a nurse played a part here; I felt a serious sadness for them. Both of them. Their story touched me emotionally in that way. That it did, and the fact that the plot unraveled quickly for me as a psychiatric professional with years of experience in forensics and crisis stabilization, bodes well for the author’s deep understanding of how the severely disturbed think and behave, and why.

It was supposed to be a thriller and suspense>crime novel. I was expecting thrilling suspense. There was crime (albeit intentionally clichéd and a sturdy, well-established, tired trope), there was fantastic psychological intrigue throughout, but not much thrill or suspense. Maybe I have lived too long, seen and heard too much, worked in too many psych facilities/forensics units, but I had the ending completely figured down to the finite details before I was two-thirds finished with the novel. The twists and turns were predictable. Nothing shocked me (except the blood on the kitchen floor, somebody needed sutures). I never feared for anyone in this book except the one who died. That didn’t stop me from enjoying the work. It was interesting from the psychological perspective, but I never found anything really thrilling about the story. It wasn’t Hitchcock, Highsmith or King suspense. That was a big disappointment, but it’s not the author’s fault. It’s just where I’m coming from.

I don’t read reviews until I’ve completed a book. There is enormous quibbling about the ending. Long standing patterns of behavior don’t change in real life without major medical intervention. Short of that, the ending is the only possible ending it could have had and remained character true and realistic.

I’m not compelled to see the movie. My husband has this next on his reading list and I’m curious for his reaction. He’s a crime novel aficionado. I would recommend the read. This was a new-to-me author and I feel she demonstrates remarkable writing talent, skill and a commitment to her writing process and the challenges it poses.

On a final note, I would like to say thanks to the publishers who set the price for the book. I think it was fair and so often that’s not the case with the traditionally published. That’s to be respected. I am giving one star for two reasons: You didn’t jack up the price for a book in demand, and the digital copy was very well done!

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kiki

Wygląd

Reviewed in Poland on February 1, 2023

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Mały format i dziwna w dotyku.

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Nora

Perfecta lectura en inglés para un nivel B2 ó más

Reviewed in Spain on July 12, 2022

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Me encanta, vi la película y quería el libro. Lo compre en inglés por que quería practicar y me gusta este tipo de literatura drama, misterio y suspense. A mí personalmente me costo por que tengo un nivel muy bajo. pero si tienes un B2 ó mas mejor.

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Katiuscia Rockenbach

Esse livro vai te prender

Reviewed in Brazil on January 2, 2019

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Tem algumas coisas que fazem um livro se destacar dentre os que eu li:
- história interessante, inovadora e surpreendente
- personagens interessantes e complexos
- forma de escrita criativa
- modo de narrativa diferente

Esse livro tem todas essas coisas!
Mesmo já tendo assistido o filme e sabendo tudo que iria acontecer, ler o livro foi uma experiência completamente nova da história, uma que eu apreciei demais e me fez ler por horas seguidas porque eu estava gostando tanto!
Quero ler muito mais da Gillian Flynn!

2 people found this helpful

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Karyna Harleik

Me encantó!

Reviewed in Mexico on November 10, 2018

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Amo completamente la película que se adaptó de esta novela y desde hace años he querido leerla. Es increíble la calidad de esta historia! De mis mejores lecturas este año, además de que llegó perfecto el libro y súper rápido.

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Surbhi Mishra

Great cliffhanger!

Reviewed in India on May 29, 2020

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Well, this is supposed to be a review of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, but the reality is, I don't have the foggiest idea how to review this novel. It's not what it seems to be, but to be too precise about what it literally is would spoil the entertainment.

The only thoughts I have after completing this book are: OH MY! WHATTA BOOK!! 😲 Ms Flynn, the author of "Sharp Objects" and "Dark Places", clearly surpassed herself with this book.

Read on to know more about this amazing book and about why I think you should most definitely give it a try!

Now, this article is divided into six categories.

• Ratings and stuff about the book.
• How I got my hands on this book.
• Some background of the author.
• The synopsis of the book.
• About the writing style.
•Some intriguing facts about the book.

•Ratings and stuff about the book:

Rating:
Botopsy rating: 5/5✨
Goodreads: 4.1/5
Amazon: 4.2/5
Length of the book: 466 pages long.
Genre: Fiction/Thriller-mystery.
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Series: Standalone.
Format: Paperback.
Source: Amazon.

•How I came across this book:

I heard a lot about Gillian Flynn and how she turns a simple story into a roller coaster ride. I wanted to try her best work and so I picked this one up, and I must admit that after reading this book, I'm completely dumbfounded!

•About the author:

Gillian Schieber Flynn ( born February 24, 1971) is an American writer. Flynn has published three novels, Sharp Objects, Dark Places, and Gone Girl,all three of which have been adapted for film or television. Flynn wrote the adaptations for the 2014 Gone Girl film and the HBO limited series Sharp Objects. She was formerly a television critic for Entertainment Weekly.

•Synopsis:

Gone Girl is sharp, mercurial, subtly layered and populated by characters so well imagined that they’re difficult to part with.

Here, in this book, we have two main characters- Nick Dunne and Amy Elliott.

Nick Dunne is a writer who lost his job in New York City when the magazine he worked for went under. He retreated to North Carthage, the small town in Missouri where he grew up, dragging his wife Amy, who is also a magazine writer. She is is also recently unemployed. Nick is a smart, good-looking guy, with a touch of the golden boy about him. When he moves to Missouri he buys a bar with his twin sister Margo. He gets a job teaching writing at the local junior college. He allows his professional prospects to quietly and gracefully deflate.

Amy on the other hand, is a type-A personality, a Harvard grad with definite ideas about Nick's career and her own. "My wife had a brilliant, popping brain, a greedy curiosity," Nick tells us. Amy doesn't fit in in North Carthage, and with no job and no social life to speak of, she's left alone at home to spin her wheels. They spin fast, very fast.

On their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick leaves the house after breakfast. He heads to work. While he is gone, Amy disappears into thin air. The journey that progresses to find the gone girl herself is maddeningly twisted, to say the least.

It almost requires a game board to show how Nick and Amy move through this book. They met at a party in Brooklyn and were momentarily smitten. After they get married Nick lost his job. So they had to move back to Nick’s hometown, North Carthage, which Amy hated. In Missouri, they had the kinds of fights, infidelity, money troubles and other noir-style problems that witnesses will remember now that Amy’s gone. (Nick, go to jail.)

Nick has a secret life that did not involve Amy. On the morning she vanished, he was off doing something that he is deeply ashamed of, and it is not revealed until late in the novel. Ms Flynn’s idea for Nick’s biggest secret will be, for some readers, the most startling detail in a book that is full of terrific little touches. 😉

Nick’s narrative begins the book, and it illustrates how many different ways there are to disassemble. Like many a less clever unreliable narrator, Nick likes lies of omission. The reader has to figure this out very gradually because Ms Flynn is impressively cagey about which details she chooses to withhold.

The invisible Amy can talk only about her past behaviour. She began keeping the diary in 2005, and it describes the marriage as an emotional roller coaster. Even when the fights began, Amy went to elaborate efforts to be cheerful and boost her husband’s spirits, but she grew more and more worried as the marriage spiralled downward.

And then the police show up. And Nick begins to lie. Not that Nick killed his wife. He's just a compulsive liar, one of those people whose deepest instinct isn't, to tell the truth; it's to tell people what he thinks they want to hear, except that he usually guesses wrong. But, when the police start unravelling his inventions, he starts to look like a bad guy. He looks worse when Amy's diary surfaces, detailing the deterioration of their marriage and Nick's increasingly volatile behaviour.

So, Did Amy die?, who killed her, is it Nick?, What secret life did Nick had? To get the answers to the above-mentioned questions you have to read the book.

Gone Girl begins as a whodunit, but by the end, it will have you wondering whether there's any such thing as a who at all.

Gone Girl is a story about men and women who live double lives not because they're secret agents or jewel thieves but because as human beings they're incapable of being who they appear to be.

Overall, the book is an incredible thriller. A must-read even for those who are not thriller fans. I bet you would become one. 😉

•Writing style:

Gillian Flynn’s greatest strength as an author lies in her ability to change the way her readers perceive her protagonists. The writing is smart, witty and appalling. The portrayal of characters is sharp and intensive. There is so much to say about the lead female character Amy and how she pulls the readers towards her.

Not to mention, the 'cool girl monologue' is on point, perfectly describes the kind of woman almost every man is looking for. The imaginative, fictional character that they desire to have for a lifetime.

•Intriguing facts:

1. When Flynn was drafting Gone Girl, main character Amy's family's business was originally a dating service. The oh-so-perfect "Amazing Amy" idea only came later.

2. Flynn wrote the screenplay of the movie version of Gone Girl, which is produced by Reese Witherspoon. Which was further nominated for Golden Globe and Bafta.

3. Flynn has said that she was inspired to write the novel by the disappearance of Californian Laci Peterson in late 2002.

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