Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton – Review | Blog Tour

An intense, nail-biting thriller.

WHAT’S THE BOOK ABOUT

The extraordinary new novel everyone is talking about from the Sunday Times best-selling author of Sister.

Three hours is 180 minutes or 10,800 seconds.

It is a morning’s lessons, a dress rehearsal of Macbeth, a snowy trek through the woods.

It is an eternity waiting for news. Or a countdown to something terrible.

It is 180 minutes to discover who you will die for and what men will kill for.

In rural Somerset in the middle of a blizzard, the unthinkable happens: a school is under siege. Told from the point of view of the people at the heart of it, from the wounded headmaster in the library, unable to help his trapped pupils and staff, to teenage Hannah in love for the first time, to the parents gathering desperate for news, to the 16-year-old Syrian refugee trying to rescue his little brother, to the police psychologist who must identify the gunmen, to the students taking refuge in the school theatre, all experience the most intense hours of their lives, where evil and terror are met by courage, love and redemption.

Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton – Review | Blog Tour

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK

Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton is an intense, nail-biting thriller, one which I could not put down until I leafed through the last page.

In rural Somerset, in the middle of a blizzard, a school is under siege. As the title suggests, the book renders a blow-by-blow account of those harrowing three hours from the perspectives of the people at the heart of it.

MULTIPLE POINT OF VIEWS

From the injured headmaster, to the teenage students frightened and angry at this onslaught on themselves, to the courageous teacher who is doing her best to protect the toddlers under her charge, to the sixteen-year-old Syrian refugee boy determined to protect his little brother from being terrorized in peaceful England, to the anguished parents waiting for some news of their trapped children with bated breath, and finally to the police psychologist who must identify the gunmen and figure out a way to stop them, Three Hours presents the point of view of each and every player, barring the gunmen themselves. Their psyche, instead, is pieced together by sifting through the trail of evidence they leave behind. As a result, I had a complete picture of how the events unfolded.

Each voice is remarkably distinct. I had no difficulty in distinguishing between the characters.

SMOOTHLY FLOWING STORY

Notably, the narrative is not linear. It jumps back and forth between the start of the siege and the middle of the siege. Sometimes, it goes even backward giving us a glimpse of an important event that set the things in motion. However, the transition between the timelines is seamless.

The book is fast-paced and maintains the same momentum till the last page. Further, it is vividly descriptive. I could see the action unfolding before my eyes and feel the children’s fear.

A COMMENTARY ON THE PRESENT STATE OF SOCIETY

Despite being fast-paced, Three Hours poignantly lays bare the fractures in the society that have emerged because of the arrival of the Muslim refugees. Even during the siege, in absence of any concrete information, some of the anxious parents immediately suspect the Syrian brothers as the orchestrators.

Although the book is set in England, this could easily happen anywhere in the world since the intolerance towards the refugees (and their difficulty in acclimatizing with the culture of their host country) is being seen all across the world.

I WAS HOOKED!

Lupton kept me spellbound. The book is rich in imagery but does not contain any fluffy words. Consequently, I finished the book in a day. I had no choice. I could not focus on any other task until I knew the children were safe. Speaking of safety, at 93% (Kindle version) my heart lurched into my mouth. You need to read the book to know why.

To conclude, Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton is a brilliant thriller taut with suspense, brimming with action, and peopled with relatable characters.

Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton

BOOK DETAILS

Genre: Thriller/Suspense || Pages: 320 || Published on January 9th 2020 by Viking

Buy on Amazon.in

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Many thanks to Ellie Hudson for inviting me to be a part of this blog tour. Many thanks to the publisher for my copy of the book via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion on the book. I opted to provide an honest review on my blog.

Favorite Quotes:

Fiction a–c and fiction d–g are the latest door fortifications; Mrs Ramsay joined by Jo March, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke; all those women with their many sisters and friends and enemies and poor-choice husbands barricading the door.

from Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton

One minute never used to seem long to Neil, the difference in the softness of a boiled egg, but now he knows how long each of the sixty seconds lasts when there’s a gunman the other side of the door, as if he’s taken control of time and stretched it.

from Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton

AUTHOR BIO

Rosamund Lupton

Her debut novel, Sister was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, a Sunday Times and New York Times best seller and the fastest selling debut in WHSmiths’ history. Her next two books Afterwards and The Quality of Silence were also Sunday Times best sellers. Her novels have been translated into over thirty languages.

Author Links: Website

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