GURU
by Louise O’Neill
Transworld UK, August 2022
Samantha Johnson is a forty-year-old, American influencer who runs a wellness empire – Shakti. With an Oscar-winning adaptation of her NYT-bestselling memoir under her belt, a powerful brand as a nononsense motivational speaker, and a booming business which she is about to sell in a multi-milliondollar deal, she has the world at her feet. She’s also launching a new book, CHASTE, in which she talks about her relationship with her sexuality. After writing a viral essay about her teenaged sexual awakening with her (female) best friend, she comes off stage after a sell-out event to some shocking news from her manager. That female best friend, Lisa, is demanding the magazine retract the essay – she never consented to this experience being shared, and what Samantha sees as a powerful erotic moment she sees very differently. She sees it as abuse. Samantha decides to return to the small town she grew up in, to confront Lisa, and convince her to drop the allegations. Once she’s back home, however, Samantha finds herself immediately wrongfooted by Lisa, now married to her high-school sweetheart, and the perfect suburban mom. Forced to confront the past she has whitewashed for years, she finds herself questioning her own memories. For both women have very different versions of how their relationship ended – so whose ‘truth’ is really a lie?
Louise O’Neill grew up in Clonakilty, a small town in West Cork, Ireland. Her first novel, Only Ever Yours, was released in 2014. Her latest novel, After the Silence, was a bestseller in Ireland.
When Saffy’s beloved grandmother, Rose, goes into a care home Saffy learns that she has inherited her Cotswolds cottage. But as work begins on much-needed renovations, the body of a young woman is uncovered in the garden. Who is she? During Rose’s more lucid moments, she reveals snippets of information that Saffy pieces together. And then another body is discovered. As she delves into Rose’s past, Saffy uncovers dark secrets, calling into question everything she thought she knew about her family.
Sydney, 2019. Twenty-five-year-old Asha, who has grown up in Australia, knows very little of her mother’s past in India. As far as her Amma is concerned, the past doesn’t matter, it’s their future that counts. But when Asha’s paternal grandfather is taken ill, her beloved father requests that they return to Madurai to see him, and he wants the whole family to go. Asha is fascinated by what her mother is hiding, and determined to discover the truth about her background: knowing all the while that she is also hiding something from her family.
After a near-death experience in Snowdonia, journalist Cecily Wong swore she’d never go to the mountains again. But when she’s offered the career opportunity of a lifetime – to interview world famous mountaineer Charles McVeigh as he completes his record-breaking mission in Nepal – she has no choice but to take it. There’s just one caveat: she has to summit the mountain first. It’s a mammoth task that Cecily fears she cannot handle, especially when disaster strikes before they’ve even left for base camp in the form of an earthquake that seriously injures one of the team, and an anonymous note left pinned to her tent, warning her there’s a murderer on the mountain.
When Betty and John meet in London at a rally for nuclear disarmament, both are living with secrets about what that war did to them. After fleeing from Germany with her father in 1945, Betty lives with her memories of the Russian occupation, a young Russian officer, and the mysterious disappearance of her sister. John too, is plagued by flashbacks to his time as a translator for the top-secret T-force which uncovered Nazi scientific secrets, and to a young German woman who was brutally murdered, and for whose murder he was framed unless he talked… As their relationship develops, their lives unfold, unravel and entwine. But when a man from the past surfaces, he threatens to reveal secrets. Secrets which will embroil them in the Cold War and threaten their very existence.