Molly is already dead when the story beings and the reader is left to glean information about her through flashbacks often coloured by the emotionally-biased men in her life.

It sits somewhere between the two and looks at the aftermath of relationships and those ‘residual’ emotions from a rather oblique position. The problem I had with this book is that I can’t call it a thriller, nor a love story in the conventional sense. In the following days, Vernon and Clive are besieged by a strange numbness in the arm, a pact is made and the emergence of a series of grainy photographs threatens to undo them all. Her loss causes shock in the publishing world where she was known as the life of the party, but that isn’t the only shock her death gives way to. As her ex-lovers, they also share another mutual feeling an intense dislike for Julian Garmony, the Foreign Secretary who once had a relationship with her and George, her morose and possessive husband. Being close friends, they knew Molly before she became a famous restaurant critic. The story opens on a chilly February morning, as Vernon Halliday (broadsheet editor) and Clive Linley (British composer) arrive to pay their respects. This is the quiet yet disturbing tale of the unforgettable Molly, her sudden death and the memory she left behind in three former lovers who meet at her funeral. Parliament, chemistry, propeller she could forgive herself, but less so bed, cream, mirror… Molly, restaurant critic, gorgeous wit and photographer, the daring gardener who had been loved by the Foreign Secretary and could still turn a perfect cartwheel at the age of forty-six.” Within weeks she was fumbling for the names of things. It began with a tingling in her arm as she raised it outside the Dorchester Grill to stop a cab a sensation that never went away.

Amsterdam novel by ian mcewan