Home Truths is everything I expect from a Charity Norman thriller. It’s compelling and chilling. Also, and this is the frightening thing about many of Charity’s stories, it’s very close to home. It could happen to any of my friends. It could happen to me. And yes, it could happen to you.
It’s this slow drawing in that Charity writes so well, sensing our lack of ability to determine a cut off point. With See You in September, I could have been that girl, at vulnerable point in my life and isolated, who accepts friendship and is willing to try a new way of life that seems promising, who takes a bit too long to see the strings. I might have been the woman in The Secrets of Strangers, the one in the cafe who nips in for a caffine shot, head busy multi-tasking her life, and gets stuck in all the complexities of other people and unable to get out. Or the girl home to visit her father with dementia, thinking back to a friend who never came down from the hill, as in Remember Me, trying to unravel the past. Lots of my friends seem to appear in Charity’s books. I worry about how closely she writes life and how many ways the unexpected can catch you.
Home Truths is nothing like the cover. It’s not a cliché packed thriller of home invasion or murderous stalkers. It’s never anything so obvious. This story is set in the North of England, where a happy family gets on with life. Mum, Livia, is a probation officer married to Scott, a teacher. Noah is five with an asthma problem and it’s Heidi’s thirteenth birthday. She’s about to go bike riding with her dad. They miss a call from Scott’s brother, a man struggling with mental health issues, and things that have been building slowly, topple.
You know that bewildered feeling you get when one of your close friends says something on the far side of what you consider wacky? Diet and health theories, anti-vax, government control, world order… At which point do you say – enough, get a grip?
Scott has always lived on the cusp of wacky, open to the ideas of their imaginative neighbours, happy to entertain new ways of thinking. When his brother dies, Scott transfers his feelings of guilt into in questions of the health service, and goes outside the mainstream for answers. Livia and the kids are gentle with him. They’re all grieving. It’s a very relatable situation, I can imagine it in many families I know.
Scott goes deeper online with his questions, and finds a whole new level of conspiracy theories that distract him from his grief. He’s vulnerable to all of it. By the time Livia realises how far down the rabbit hole her husband has gone, her gentle rationality is not enough to save him. Scott tries to protect his family and community from all the evil out there in the world. Heidi shows the growing crisis from a child’s perspective; she loves and trusts her father, even when her brother’s health is at stake. Then shit happens. Serious shit, in the real world.
And from there on you won’t put the book down until the end, after which you will quietly get out of bed in the middle of the night and take your family’s phones and laptops and bury them all in the garden.
There are no answers to the problem’s raised in this book. These issues of fake news, disinformation and conspiracy are here, easily accessible from inside the safe space of your home. Harder to remove and as dangerous, perhaps, as alcohol or gambling or other addictions. We’re all online. That’s the chilling thing. Life can go terribly wrong in so many ways and the dangers here really are ones to worry about.
There are lots of things to discuss in this book: where do you cross the wacky line; how can/should you help someone who has crossed it; what constitutes a conspiracy theory and how do you know it’s not the truth; what might you do differently? Discuss this book with everyone you know and see if you can come up with some kind of a plan, before it happens to you.
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