A quiet man loses slowly.

The marriage is the worst thing I have read in years and I mean that as praise. Edith isn't a villain; she is somebody who was never asked what she wanted either, and the two of them wreck each other with almost no raised voices.

Read this across a week of very cold mornings and it suited them.

What I keep coming back to is the daughter. Grace. Nobody in that house does anything obviously monstrous to her and she is destroyed anyway, quietly, in the background, and her father watches it happen and doesn't act, and the novel refuses to let him off.

Eight, not more, because Lomax is overdone. The department villain is drawn thicker than everybody else and I could feel the author's thumb. And because Katherine leaves on a note that felt convenient.

Not put-downable in my usual sense. You can stop it easily, nothing is pulling you along, but you carry it around all day afterwards and it makes you slightly worse company.