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Gone Girl: A Novel Mass Market Paperback – May 22, 2018

by Gillian Flynn (Author)

4.1 163,375 ratings

Editors' pick Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

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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).

NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY TIME AND ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY 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?

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Chicago Tribune • HuffPost • Newsday

“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

Editorial Reviews

Review

“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 ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (May 22, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1524763675
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1524763671
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.2 x 1.2 x 7.4 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,152,300 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #47,732 in Suspense Thrillers
- #57,394 in American Literature (Books)
- #233,752 in Genre Literature & Fiction

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4.1 163,375 ratings

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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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Kindle Customer

What took me so long to read this?

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2021

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Let me start off this review by issuing a massive SPOILER WARNING for a novel that came out a little less than a decade ago. There will be major spoilers ahead, so I would advise you to read this book (if you, like me, have been living under a rock for the past 8 years or so) before looking at this review.. As a matter of fact, this won’t be as much of a review, instead, it’ll be a series of my reactions to a couple of things in the story.

I was meaning to read this book in 2015 after I read and enjoyed Paula Hawkins’s “The Girl on The Train”. I’ve heard many people comparing that book to this one and I wanted to see how similar the two were. In my opinion, I didn’t get as much similarities as I was expecting, but they were both enjoyable psychological thrillers.

Anyways, Gone Girl has been in my library for a while and I finally decided to read it. I’ll have to admit, about halfway through, I had a strong feeling that I would be giving this book 5 stars. It literally grabbed me from the beginning and never let me go. All the high praise I've heard about it throughout the years didn't do this story justice.

The first -I wanna say- half of this book is the main story. Married woman mysteriously disappears, and the husband is left to find out what happened to his wife. However, the story changes point of views from the husband to the wife’s perspective through a series of diary entries she wrote, and I have to admit. I was completely fooled!

As the story goes on, I’m wondering who kidnapped this man’s wife. I started gathering suspects right off the bat. The neighbor who informed Nick that the door was open. He was my number one suspect at first. Then I blamed the people from Amy’s past. For a brief moment, I thought Nick’s twin sister kidnapped her. I was just looking for answers and I knew the only way I would get my answer is if I keep reading. The beauty of mystery novels.

So, for the first half of the book, I’m looking at all of the surrounding characters funny. Someone here is a murderer. And as I’m doing that, Amy’s diary entries begin to take a dark turn. She starts writing about Nick’s coldness. Nick becoming a completely new person than the guy she told us about in the first diary entry. He became someone who I honestly started to dislike. He treated her horribly, he even shows a weird abusive side. The later diary entries made me think that maybe HE did it all along and that’s the big twist. I also had a small thought that maybe she faked her kidnapping because he was so abusive and she wanted to escape him, but that seemed like it wouldn’t be it, so I shoved that theory to the side. Not like it mattered anyway. Lol.

Turns out, I was half-right with that theory I pushed to the side. The whole time, I’m worried about this sweet, lovable woman and it turns out she staged the whole thing, knowing that all signs will point to her horrible, possibly abusive husband. After the halfway point of the novel, we find out that the Amy that we knew from the diaries was a made-up character. She’s nothing like who she appeared to be. She’s manipulative and has always been that way. There are a few moments where I screamed at my Kindle, “This woman is evil!” I was completely caught off guard and that doesn’t happen a lot.

Then we see the beginning of Amy’s plan, living as a supposedly dead woman and even that builds suspense in itself because she has to continuously look over her shoulder and hope that nobody ever notices her. It’s a crazy way to live, but Amy is always three steps ahead in planning. She befriends two people who are also on the run apparently, and they end up turning on her, and stealing the money she had reserved for her new life, leaving her with a cut lip, no money, and a ruined plan. Leaving her to call her high school sweetheart, a man we met earlier in the story and he -to my disappointment- ends up helping her. Inviting a woman who is allegedly kidnapped to your house is a bad move. I knew that wasn’t going to end well. I thought Amy would somehow get into a fight with Desi (the guy who came to her rescue), but I didn’t expect her to actually murder him, but the more I thought about it, it makes sure he can’t tell the truth and pay a bunch of high-quality lawyers to make sure she spends the rest of her life behind bars. Another case of Amy being one step ahead of everybody. This woman is a criminal mastermind.

Not only was this story a freaking roller coaster of a read, but it was just overall fun to read. So many layers to the story, so many twists and turns, clever dialogue all throughout, and even the end surprised me. I was sure this story would end with one of the main characters going to jail, but surprisingly, it was (sort of) a happy ending… at least for the puppet master it was a happy ending. 5 stars!

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An emotionally provoking book and worth the ride.

Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2015

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Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl is one of those books that you think about after you put it down. You have conversations in your head with your imaginary book buddy about it, even if only to talk about how f***ed up this couple is.

I did a google search of Gillian Flynn, just to make sure that I'd spelled her name right. And, of course, being the curious person that I am, I also did an image search of her. She is a very unassuming looking woman. Who would know of the darkness that lies within her just by looking at her? As you're reading this book, it's very hard for me to imagine the very depth of insaneness Gillian had to feel while writing and editing this book. And all the time that she had to spend feeling it. It takes a lot of time to be able to write a book of the quality and error-free (and no, I'm not talking about grammar) of this caliber.

This book is a murder mystery. Uh, well, excuse me... This book is about a possible murder mystery. It's told from the present viewpoint of a man named Nick, who is married to a woman named Amy. Nick comes from a less than stellar upbringing, which an unloving dad who holds very antiquated and religiously hateful opinions about women. However, he has a very close relationship with his loving mother and twin, so that's something.
The book is also written from the viewpoint of Nick's wife, with the first part of the book being told by her past diary. So we're getting the story told from the present day Nick and the past day Amy. Amy is the trust fund, only child, of 2 parents who wrote children's books about her upbringing and made millions of dollars off them.

The book starts off the morning of the Event, with Nick waking up to Amy making crepes for him on their 5th wedding anniversary. Then, Nick comes home from work to find the scene of a struggle and Amy missing. The rest of the book is about what happened to Amy, is she alive, did Nick kill her?

Now, the whole hype about this book is the infamous twist. Because it's been very hyped up, I had certain expectations going into it and so I was very suspicious about everything. Unfortunately for me, because of all the hype, the twist wasn't as much of a surprise as it could've been. I tried to determine if I would've been able to figure it out if I'd hadn't known that there was a twist, but I just don't know. And even the very last chapters was a no brainer for me. I knew for a long time that she was holding onto those things, waiting for the right moment to use them. (I'm being vague for those who haven't read the book)

I love how Gillian writes characters that aren't all that particularly loveable. Maybe Nick's twin sister, maybe, was the most "loveable" character in this book. But one thing I've learned as an author is that it doesn't matter if you like a character, as long as you care about what happens to them. And I can definitely say that I cared about Nick. All the way... to the very last sentence.

***From here on out, Spoiler Alerts***

I wanted him to nail that b*tch, Amy. Right to the wall. Of a long jail sentence.
The frustration level of his lack of ability to pin down her confessions on a recording device (can't you buy some super spy waterproof recording device that implants into your skin??), the lack of concern by the extremely gullible police (except for Boney) builds as the book winds down and then, horror or all horrors, she uses those little baby-making sperm to condemn Nick AND THE BABY to a lifetime of hell with her. Of course Gillian ends the book there, without us knowing if she miscarries and if Nick ever gets his revenge. Because that's The Story: the story of the man and woman who's life is about the constant ups and down, about manipulation to the millionth degree and about Daily. Constant. Struggle. The author's way out though is the fact that in a weird twisted way Nick still loves Amy and actually has fun with her. His life isn't all that bad. I mean, he can never relax, never sleep the deep sleeps that he's so proud of, never turn his back on his wife ever again. But hey, at least they have some fun sometimes, right?

One of the best, absolute best, ironies of the book was the Dancing Monkey. That at the end, both Nick and Amy become the ultimate dancing monkeys? The live the rest of their life in a continual dance, each trying to outwit the other for small prizes of love, affection, attention and staying alive.

One area where I was very disappointed was in her lack of character development for Amy's parents. How on earth can 2 supposedly loving, caring and so in-love parents produce Amy. I don't buy her explanation: the expectation of perfection and being an only, and spoiled, child. I just don't think that those kinds of things would drive Amy to be the person that she became. I thought for a milli-second that we were getting to the realness of her when she explained that her dad had molested her. And then we find out that that's only a lie. Just like everything else. I wanted to see the weakness - even if it was only a glimpse - of the crack of the facade of Marybeth and Rand. But it never came.

I also was a little disappointed in the lack of an "ah-hah" moment for the things that the dad was saying. Of course, the reader gets it, but Nick, or anyone else for that matter, doesn't. Although, having dealt with grandparents of dementia, sometimes that's just how things are. Some things that they say, we never really get.

Another thing I didn't buy was images in Nick's head that Gillian tried to use to make us believe that Nick had killed Amy. Her head smashed in, or her, being pulled on the floor, bloody and crying out to Nick. Nick had these images in his head before he knew for sure that Amy was framing him. Now, I know that Gillian wants us to think that Nick killed her, and these images are his memories of the event. Then she explains these images as Nick's way of dealing with his anger, a way of keeping control of his anger by pushing it all inside, an "oily" anger-infested rage pushed down so deep inside as to not show his true emotions. However, I'm just not finding any reason for Nick to feel that amount of hatred towards Amy at that point in the book. Sure, after he finds out the length and depths that she went to to frame him, but before? He's just unhappy in his marriage, not necessarily angry at her. Or at least, angry enough to imagine violent brutal images of her impending death. I think she should've given us a better reason for those images.

All in all though, an emotion provoking book and worth the emotional ride.

23 people found this helpful

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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.

2 people found this helpful

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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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Gone Girl: A Novel Mass Market Paperback – May 22, 2018

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