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Loading... The Woman in the Window: A Novel (original 2018; edition 2018)by A. J. Finn (Author)
Work InformationThe Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn (Pseudonym) (2018)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. One of my favorite movies is Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock. This book (and soon-to-be movie) is very similar to that, except that the person looking out the window is a woman (Anna) and she's not recuperating in a wheelchair. She is an agoraphobe which is why she's always looking out her window. She lives alone but has a very handsome tenant that lives in her basement. One day, while looking out her window, she is spotted by a woman who lives across the park and the woman comes over to visit Anna and they talk for a few hours. The next night, Anna looks out her window and sees something sinister which nobody else can prove. She begins to wonder if she even saw anything at all or if she completely imagined it. I don't usually see movies based on books but I sure hope the movie does the book justice. I highly recommend "The Woman in the Window", to those out there who like a twisted suspense novel. The main character, Anna Fox, is an agoraphobic who becomes captivated by the lives of her neighbors through watching them out her window. Of course, she sees a murder or does she? We have all experienced that safe place in our lives. In the case of Anna Fox her "safe place" becomes not so safe. I do not want to say much more and ruin the story. I found I had trouble putting the book down, because I wanted to see what would happen next. I am not usually surprised by the endings of a book, but "The Women in the Window" shocked me with the who, what, when of the end. I will read more of A. J. Finn in the future. I will comment that Amazon puts this book with Gone Girl and writers like Tana French who I love don't get me wrong I just want to say what A.J Finn has here stands on it's own very well without the comparison and is uniquely it's own.
The Woman in the Window (Morrow), a highly successful début novel by the pseudonymous A. J. Finn (thirty-eight-year-old Daniel Mallory, a former editor at Morrow), is a superior example of a subset of recent thrillers featuring “unreliable” female protagonists who, despite their considerable handicaps—which may involve alcoholism, drug addiction, paranoia, and even psychosis—manage to persevere and solve mysteries where others have failed. Its title evokes such best-sellers as The Girl on the Train and The Woman in Cabin 10, not to mention Gone Girl (in which the titular girl is the contriver of the mystery), while its frame of reference involves classic American noir films: Gaslight, Vertigo, Strangers on a Train, Wait Until Dark, Sudden Fear, Rope, and, most explicitly, Rear Window. Indeed, although the protagonist of The Woman in the Window, a thirty-nine-year-old child psychologist named Anna Fox, is wryly self-aware, her mode of narration resembles a film script. ... A.J. Finn turns out to be the nom de plume for Daniel Mallory, an executive editor at Morrow, the book's publisher, with a special interest in mysteries and film noir. The Woman in the Window is his tribute to both genres and, let me say outright, he does them credit.... What this is is an intelligent, carefully constructed novel of psychological suspense that focuses on a single character whose moods, secrets and fears drive the plot. It's here, in that slow buildup, that Finn/Mallory shows his real talent. He's much more in tune with the intense characters of Minette Walters or Frances Fyfield.... Aside from a visit from a neighbourhood child whose family she's been watching, nothing much happens for more than 100 pages. I confess, I put the book down and might not have gone back but for this review. Other readers may do the same. Please slog on, there is a reason here. Has the adaptationAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"It isn't paranoia if it's really happening ... Anna Fox lives alone -- a recluse in her New York City home, drinking too much wine, watching old movies ... and spying on her neighbors. Then the Russells move next door: a father, a mother, their teenaged son. The perfect family. But when Anna sees something she shouldn't, her world begins to crumble -- and its shocking secrets are laid bare. What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this gripping Hitchcockian thriller, no one and nothing are what they seem."-- No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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KIRKUS: Crackling with tension, and the sound of pages turning, as twist after twist sweeps away each hypothesis you come up with...
A lonely woman in New York spends her days guzzling merlot, popping pills, and spying on the neighbors—until something she sees sucks her into a vortex of terror.
“The Miller home across the street—abandon hope, all ye who enter here—is one of five townhouses that I can survey from the south-facing windows of my own.” A new family is moving in on her Harlem street, and Dr. Anna Fox already knows their names, employment histories, how much they paid for their house, and anything else you can find out using a search engine. Following a mysterious accident, Anna is suffering from agoraphobia so severe that she hasn't left her house in months. She speaks to her husband and daughter on the phone—they've moved out because "the doctors say too much contact isn't healthy"—and conducts her relationships with her neighbors wholly through the zoom lens of her Nikon D5500. As she explains to fellow sufferers in her online support group, food and medication (not to mention cases of wine) can be delivered to your door; your housecleaner can take out the trash. Anna’s psychiatrist and physical therapist make house calls; a tenant in her basement pinch-hits as a handyman. To fight boredom, she’s got online chess and a huge collection of DVDs; she has most of Hitchcock memorized. Both the game of chess and noir movie plots—Rear Window, in particular—will become spookily apt metaphors for the events that unfold when the teenage son of her new neighbors knocks on her door to deliver a gift from his mother. Not long after, his mother herself shows up…and then Anna witnesses something almost too shocking to be real happening in their living room. Boredom won’t be a problem any longer.
Crackling with tension, and the sound of pages turning, as twist after twist sweeps away each hypothesis you come up with about what happened in Anna’s past and what fresh hell is unfolding now.