Both thrilling and deeply moving, The Stranger is a devastating love story full of intrigue and dark secrets from Richard and Judy bestselling author Saskia Sarginson.v

I'm 20% into this book and I don't like where the author is taking this story. A stranger appearing in your garden , offer him to stay on your grounds for the night, offer him work the next day and then ... an unrealistic storyline for me, not my cup of tea. Sorry!

A beautifully written, solid thriller, and an easy read for my holiday! There's an interesting premise at the heart of this story, and I really liked the two main characters, the complex relationships and how they intertwined. Definately recommend! Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

A small town complete with a tea room is the setting of this nuanced tale by Saskia Sarginson. This is not the obvious psychological thriller with never-ending surprises that I was expecting, but unsurprisingly given the previous two books I’ve read by this author; The Other Me and The Twins, there is undeniable tension and that sense of needing to know what happens next.
Eleanor Rathmell is the owner of the aforementioned tea room, she also keeps an assortment of animals at her home which she shares with her husband William. All is good in her life, except the secret she has kept all her married life. With few cares in her world, Ellie’s life is turned upside down when she witnesses a horrific car crash, an accident that to her horror she discovers results in William’s death. Worse is to come as she finds evidence that she wasn’t the only one with a secret.
What starts as a fairly standard secrets and lies premise quickly morphs into a fairly issue-led novel about migrants. I was delighted to find although the author had clearly done her research, this not being a ‘shouty’ book from a soapbox, she hadn’t forgotten that we, her readers, want to be entertained. I can’t deny the social commentary on an issue that is far more complex than either side of the debate can sometimes appear to be willing to understand. The migrants featured in The Stranger work on a local farm working for David, a rich farmer with two grown-up children. The local’s mistrust of these migrants could seem at odds with the fundraiser they run for the refugees of the Syrian disaster. When a Romanian moves into Ellie’s garage to help out with jobs on the smallholding strange things begin to happen and there are no shortage of people willing to warn Ellie about the mistake she is making. Ellie has to decide whether the stranger she has welcomed is behind the acts or is someone trying to remove him from the scene.
From that short taster you can see that the plot lines of a widow struggling to comprehend the loss of her husband coupled with the secrets she has uncovered seem at total odds with the local issues of migrants but all of this is neatly tied in, often revolving around the tea room where everyday life continues and Ellie gets her life back onto some sort of track with the help of her assistant Kate. Inevitably there is some romance to sweeten the darker aspects of the storyline which emerge gradually and with great restraint as the book progresses.
The characters are distinct and the dialogue convincing which combined with the measured writing creates a subtle tension when life in the village begins to unravel and Ellie is left unsure who she can trust. The final outcome all the more shocking for the way the author plays the build-up straight down the line.
Although this wasn’t quite the book I was expecting to read I found it to be both an entertaining and thought-provoking read.
I’d like to thank Little Brown for providing me with a copy of The Stranger. This unbiased review is my thanks to them.

great read and easy to follow story line. look forward to reading more from this author

Masterfully written, this book hooked me in from start to finish with its wonderfully crafted twists and turns. Touching on so many gutsy, real life, current issues, this is so much more than just a psychological thriller. Highly recommend it.

Twisty, turny, dark and suspenseful.... who can you trust? The main protagonist Ellie becomes friendly with her upper-crust neighbour David, a year after her husband William dies in a car accident. William has lost his wife too, so they are lost souls together.

Ellie's worried about what the Kent villagers will think about her relationship with David and even more so when she befriends a migrant worker called Luca....

So far, so straight forward. But Saskia Sarginson weaves a darker tale from these threads - making for an uncomfortable read at times. It all comes together brilliantly but I did find that I had to put the book down and come back to it after a couple of days' breather!

All in all, it's a respectable 3.9* from me. Perhaps I wasn't in the right frame of mind for this book -- Saskia Sarginson's The Twins is one of my all-time-favourites - her writing is fabulous.

Eleanor Rathmell has kept a secret from her husband for as long as she has known him. When he is fatally injured during a tragic car accident on his way home, Ellie is shocked to discover that he had been keeping secrets himself. She cannot believe that he would cheat on her but the evidence she discovers in his office seems irrefutable. David, a rich neighbour, also loses his wife to cancer at around about the same time and begins to pay her visits. Still she cannot bring herself to tell him of her suspicions but as they grow closer and closer she longs to break her silence. She enjoys his company and soon a sensual and tender romance begins; a relationship such as she never had with her husband even when they first met.
At the same time she meets Luca, a Romanian who used to be a star trapeze artist at the travelling circus that is performing locally. He needs a temporary new job and a home, so Ellie decides to employ him with lodgings and keep thrown in. She needs her land clearing and help with her animals. She owns the local café and cannot keep on top of all of the jobs she has to do. However her actions enrage the locals who are mistrustful of the local migrant labourers, let alone Roma people. A new comer to the local Kentish village community herself, she decides to ignore their narrow-mindedness and go with her snap decision. Luca is an excellent worker and she trusts him. He knows his boundaries and is helpful and makes her feel safe, especially as he helps her after a break in. But somebody is not at all happy and a series of bizarre happening frighten Ellie so much she begins to fear for her safety.
‘The Stranger’ by Saskia Sarginson is a real corker of a thriller. It is multilayered, using flashbacks to reveal more about the story and the characters, enriching our understanding of them. The storytelling is engaging and fast paced, disclosing issues such as grief, fledgling love, greed, adoption, domestic abuse and prejudice against social minorities. It is tense, absorbing and intriguing, full of unexpected twists and turns and yet very moving. The ending is shocking, violent and heart-stopping. I would like to thank NetGalley and Piatkus for my copy of the novel sent out to me in return for an honest review. This is a very good read, exciting, absorbing and with a clever action packed plot. I really enjoyed it and award it 4.5*.

Ellie Rathmell is living an idyllic country life with her husband when her world is shattered by witnessing his death in a horrifying accident. As she comes to terms with her loss she realises she didn't know him as well as she thought, at the same time dealing with her own guilt over keeping her own huge secret. Into her life comes Luca, an Romanian down on his luck who she feels compelled to help. But with small villages often come small minds and she faces criticism and dire warnings not just from neighbours but also the handsome widower who has become more than just a friend. Under the supposed idyllic village life lurks violence, prejudice and deceit. Sometimes the danger isn't from strangers....

Great premise, great writing, all round a very good thriller. I have one quibble (and its a sort of backhand compliment). I think a trick was really missed with the story of the migrants in the village. Their story is important here but I felt as if I wanted more of that side as well. But like I say, a backhander.....I just wanted more! It felt as if it ended to suddenly.

Thanks to Netgalley for a review copy for an unbiased review.

I was really looking forward to reading The Stranger – not just because I had enjoyed the other book I had read by Sarginson (Without You) but because the opening, which I used for a previous Tuesday Intro post on my blog, completely drew me in. I found it beautifully, though simply, written and it painted a picture in my head that I still haven’t quite shaken.

The prologue (from which the intro was taken) has a young girl, a new mother, giving away her baby for adoption. It is heart breaking. It also suggests darker things might follow; “After all the hate, there you were.” And, given the type of books I normally read, I have to admit I envisioned an angry and bitter son appearing years later with an axe to grind, figuratively and literally.

This wasn’t the case though and, whilst what I got was still a thriller, it was a much more nuanced and thoughtful piece of writing than I had maybe being expecting. The prologue, rather than hinting of what was to come was rather an explanation of some of the behaviours of the central character, Ellie. These are further explained by flashbacks to her teenage years, which show how she has become the woman she has.

Most of the story, though, takes place in the present and in Kent, a region on the front line of the migrant crisis that played out on our screens the last few years. Migrants, their role in our lives (picking the food we eat, offering cheap labour) and our attitudes towards them (anger, distrust, general wariness as well as compassion) are front and centre in this book. Sarginson manages to highlight these issues without being preachy and turns their plight and our response to it into a gripping read, one that kept me turning pages.

She does this by making it about human beings and about love. Yes, this is a novel full of suspense but it is also a story with love at it’s heart (not a soppy love story but one about caring for and about people). The question is, who does Ellie love and who is lying to her, because there are two men vying for her heart and each believes the other is the bad guy, the one she can’t trust. It’s up to Ellie to figure it out, slowly unpicking the web of lies she has found herself at the centre of and which could end up threatening her life.

Possibly the only downside to the book is the who became clear a bit too early for me as I like to be kept guessing BUT to make up for this there were other twists in the tale I didn’t see coming at all and which kept me reading. And, I have to remember this wasn’t a standard domestic thriller of girl meets boy, boy turns out to be a psychopath. It was deeper than that and better for it. I liked it a lot and would definitely recommend it.