The End of Alice

“The End of Alice” is perhaps one of the most disturbing novels I have ever read, on a par with “The Piano Teacher” by Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Elfriede Jelinek.

I'm a man of strange tastes. I love it when literature takes me to places that only literature can lead you to, though this place, this room in which this novel dwells, is without a doubt the darkest, most terrifying and most unsettling I have ever visited.

A paedophile serving a sentence in a state prison for the sexual abuse of minors, with a story so brutal behind him that it is what ultimately put him there, begins an epistolary relationship with a nineteen-year-old girl obsessed with a twelve-year-old boy. It is through this most perverse mentor–mentee relationship that both characters, clear mirrors of one another, examine their pasts, their passions, and the reasons that have led them to become the beasts they are at heart.

A.M. Homes never disappoints. With an elegant, almost baroque prose, she dissects the psychology of characters as extreme as these, showing you the most violent urges of human beings the way one opens an animal up to show you, without shame, what it is made of.

Twisted, beautiful, empathetic, cruel, shameless, gothic, obscene, bleeding yet terribly human, this novel will take you by the hand into hells you didn't even know existed, but into which, if and only if you can bear it, you will want to keep descending in order to answer the one question that cannot have an answer. Why are we the way we are?