I loved this book. It was both heart-warming and heart-breaking, dark at times and also so joyful and full of hope. I really enjoyed the writing style, almost poetic. Patch and Saint were so well drawn and I could picture the settings so clearly. One that stays with you. Highly recommend.

Chris Whitaker established himself as a star of the literary mystery with We Begin at the End, and All the Colours of the Dark is another beautifully written novel with vivid and unforgettable characters that will stay with you long after turning the final page. Recommended!

My first book by this author but it definitely won’t be the last. I really enjoyed the unique and beautiful writing style. I finished it a few weeks ago and it’s certainly stuck with me.

My First Christ Whitaker and it won't be my last - adored this from start to finish. It is as good as everyone says!

Wow... I don't know what to make of this book but I know it was excellent. I've never read anything like it. It was so complex yet so easy to read, so harrowing yet heartwarming. Such a bundle of contradictions, and clearly a future classic. It does transcend genre and I can see why everyone's talking about it. I'm still puzzled and outraged and charmed all at the same time! Highly recommended.

A great read! Felt fresh for the thriller genre and kept me turning the pages long after I needed to put it down.

I have previously loved the authors books, but I just cannot get into this, so I will purchase a physical copy to read. I haven’t given a low star rating as I know I will love the book, just not in this format

My favourite book of the year so far, and it will take some beating! Chris Whitaker writes people and places with a special kind of magic. The characters are flawed and real, and the story has so much depth to it. I’m often disappointed by the endings of books, but from first to last sentence, I loved this completely.

A great book! Kept me gripped throughout. Felt fresh and compelling, not an average thriller. I haven't read Chris' other work, but I will seek it out now.

All the Colours of the Dark by Chris Whitaker

Chris Whitaker has written some of the most memorable novels I’ve read in recent years, particularly managing to breathe life into troubled young souls who have the worst to deal with and overcome. And usually with them, we have the people, often flawed, who try and care for them. In his latest novel, Whitaker focuses on Patch, a boy so called because of his eye patch, a boy who likes to think he’s a pirate. One summer, Patch saves a girl caught in the woods of this small town in America. He is abducted instead and held in darkness for such a long time with a girl whose voice alone he knows, Grace’s voice. No-one misses Patch more than his friend Saint Brown who becomes obsessed with finding him, just as Patch for decades afterwards will try and find Grace. it is a tortured, haunting tale, wrapped around the mystery of the identity of the abductor. Possibly because I don’t like to descend too deeply into darker fiction, I found the novel a little too troubling for me, a bit too much, but I’m a lone voice with this. Everyone I know who’s read it, loves it.

This book started off really well but it somehow, quite quickly, became very slow. I ended up giving up at 35% as it feels like it’s not going anywhere.

I am definitely in the minority with this view as lots of other readers have loved it. Sorry this one wasn’t for me.

Many thanks to #NetGalley for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This book wasn't for me, at times I found it just a little word-heavy but that's fine because despite it not being to my personal taste, I can't deny it was STUNNING. Breathtaking scenes, viscerally descriptive and vivid with emotion, intrigue, compelling characters and brilliantly written pacing that keeps you hooked on the dark mystery unfolding around you. A highly accomplished literary thriller with a dark, yet poetic edge.

Sometimes you come across a book that stands out from anything else you have read in the past year and for me this was such a book. The basis of the story is the consequences faced by so many people in the wake of the kidnap, imprisonment and subsequent rescue of Patch a thirteen year old boy with only one eye. Growing up with his struggling mother, his father having been a fatal casualty in the Vietnam war, Patch has only one friend a girl named Saint. Their lives remain closely tied even though following his rescue they take divergent paths over the next decades. It is at once a serial killer crime story, a love story of great depth and modern morality tale set in a small American township full of colourful characters and secrets.I found it deeply moving and thought provoking in the way only the best of authors can convey.
Some novels are enjoyable to read but soon fade in the memory as you move on but this one will stay with me for a long long time.

A story of three young people, forever bound together over a span of decades. Patch the pirate rescuer, held captive himself. Saint, the outsider turned hunter and Misty, the perfect princess. Patch’s imprisonment is shared by Grace and his search to find her when others don’t believe she even exists is his life’s mission. Superb characters, the best being Sammy the art dealer who gets all the best lines.

This was one of my most anticipated reads for 2024 and it was stunning. All the Colours of the Dark was all I was hoping for and so much more. It captured me from the start, made me cry (a lot) and laugh and smile and it deserves all the praise and plaudits and more. Thank you to Orion Publishing and Netgally for letting me read this. Saint and Patch will stay with me alongside Duchess. My book of the year for sure ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Superb thriller.
Monta Clare is rocked when a teenager is kidnapped as he protects a girl. His best friend Saint will not rest until she finds him. But finding him brings Grace into play - the girl whose hand slipped into his in the dark while he was held prisoner. and who may or may not actually exist. Now Patch is free but he isn't really free until he can find Grace.
Moving across decades this superbly constructed tale brings in a wonderful character ensemble and in Patch and Saint the author has drawn wonderfully on the joys and pains of friendship and love.
Highly recommended and a real joy of a read.

A little late. Sorry. It’s a ling book. Review on Ama already.

Just buy it!
All the mighty and worthy are going to come out of their caves to back this little pony. Top of this and winner of that but is it a good read?
This IS a good book. No. A great one. It’s landed into my top 10 books of all time, buttressing Possession, AS Byatt.
The book is about the journey not the destination so if you’re looking for something quick this isn’t for you. If you like exquisite prose and dialogue married with superb plotting however…

All The Colours Of The Dark was a book I thought I’d like with all the hype surrounding it but unfortunately it was t for me.
Saint and Patch are the main characters in this book and we follow the, through the years of 1976 to 2001, twenty five years in total. In this time we see the, grow up through their teenage years into adulthood and the different lines their lives take them. They live in a small town and nothing bad happens until girls keep disappearing. Patch is bullied throughout his young life but manages to turn his life around becoming an artist of high esteem and Saint who goes into the law enforcement probably due to the fact of best friend going missing and never returning.
This book was long, so long I nearly gave up but carried on, at 600 pages it was a mammoth read especially when the story is down beat. Nothing good happens and the short chapters are nothing short of irritating. I went with the hype with this book but it was to my detriment. I feel if 250 pages had been cut it wouldn’t have made the story any happier but would have got there quicker with less fluff.
I would like to thank NetGalley and Orion Publishing for this ARC I received in exchange for an honest review.

As good as everyone says it is. What starts as a story of a young boy saving a girl from abduction soon moves into an epic, winding tale of a serial killer. But this is far more than a crime novel - it is a deeply felt, gorgeously written, epic character novel that demands you become deeply and personally involved. Addictive, compelling, and heart-breaking, this story and these characters will stay with me for a very long time. This is perfect for fans of Where The Crawdads Sing.

Looking back at children growing up in a more innocent time half a century ago (how quickly things change!), it's hard not to draw comparisons, at least initially, between All the Colours of the Dark and works like Stand by Me or even Stranger Things without the dark fantasy and horror. Chris Whitaker certainly captures something of the warmth and magic of childhood around this mid-seventies, a time when the world felt grander, was more diverse, exciting and unknown, where imagination replaced Instagram. But it's not an idealised depiction by any means, nor is it steeped in nostalgia. There is nothing innocent about what happens in the lives of a number of children growing up around this time in Monta Clare, Missouri.

In fact, All the Colours of the Dark opens with hope dying. On a morning in 1975 the day that her bees went missing, 13-year-old Saint finds out that her friend Joseph 'Patch' Macauley has been stabbed, abducted and, as time passes, is now in all likelihood dead. The young boy, with pretensions of being a pirate on account of having been born with a bad eye and living up to the hand dealt by fate by wearing an eye-patch with some measure of swagger, had run to the rescue of Misty Meyer, the daughter of a wealthy family, who was being attacked in a clearing by a man wearing a balaclava. Misty escaped, but Patch has disappeared, leaving only a bloody T-shirt behind. And soon after than, another girl disappears.

The impact on the small town is immense. Despite not exactly being a popular kid, more than a little strange by all accounts and belonging to a poor family, the news of the disappearance strikes deep in the community, not least with Saint, who was really Patch's only friend. While the rest of the world moves on or falls apart, Saint isn't going to rest until she finds what has happened to her friend, following the trail of other girls who have disappeared in the region.

But this is only the beginning of an epic story of stolen youth and lost innocence, All the Colours of the Dark taking in the decades that pass and the impact it has on survivors and those damaged by the experience, considering the void that is left and how it leaves something burns through the years. It's also a journey into an interior world, of experiencing feelings that no one else can understand, experiences that change and define your life. The author explores that in remarkable depth and at length, but there is not one unnecessary scene or exchange in the book. It's a wonderful celebration of humanity, of life, or facing challenges, of finding a purpose and something worth living for. It's deeply romantic in the classic sense; of noble intentions and the determination to live with integrity, of heroism and the belief in holding to an ideal despite incredible challenges.

But All the Colours of the Dark does not exist in a bubble of nostalgia for a lost time. It's also rooted in the real world in terms of how those youthful ideas cope in a world that is progressively changing for the worse. As much as some try to cling on to the unrealistic dreams of holding onto the past, the novel in passing reports on wars and lone gunmen in schools, on the natural disasters that occur with increasing frequency. The years pass and the writing sometime takes elliptical jumps that leave you momentary unmoored - an effect that is surely intentional - but there is one constant running through the book that never lets up in intensity, and in a long book that can be agonising as much as gripping. What isn't in doubt however is that this is an extraordinary and powerful book, a wild romantic adventure of youthful ideals running up against the harsh reality of troubled times.