How to Kill Your Family: THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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When Grace Bernard discovered that her absentee millionaire father had rejected her dying mother’s pleas for help, she vows revenge and sets about killing every member of his family. For me, Grace was not the witty anti-hero she should be, but rather came across as an extremely unlikeable, self-centred and, ultimately, shallow individual. Usually for me, when I take a dislike to one of the main characters, I feel like it's a slog to read through the rest of the book. Because you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but everybody does that ‘cause the cover is always a big deal!

Gekoski has been in the rare books trade for more than half a century, years during which time the business has changed only modestly. There’s a lot that fell flat for me in How to Kill Your Family, but a key gripe was that the chapters were endless. It’s dark and funny and brilliantly observed – just as I expected it to be based on Bella’s previous output. Ironic twists and caustic commentary on everything from liberal guilt to the consumerist con that is “self-care” sharpen a debut novel that may lack the subtlety of the classic film, but delivers an antiheroine able to best villainous male protagonists such as Patrick Bateman any day. It actually has more in common with The Thursday Murder Club than it has with Sixteen Horses – a very dark book I read recently.Grace is the illegitimate daughter of Simon Artemis, a super-rich but morally-bankrupt fashion mogul who abandoned Grace’s mother (and Grace) without a penny, leaving them to live in abject poverty. Grace's primary aim in the killing of her father's immediate family was to cut off any other potential lines of inheritance for her father's million pound fortune, therefore leaving all of the money to herself. i thought it was going to follow the protagonist plotting all the different murders - but that was barely focused on at all.

If you’re looking for a humorous read and you don’t mind a murder or two, I can definitely recommend How to Kill Your Family. When Grace discovers her bio dad, a millionaire, rejected her and her dying mother, she decides to enact her revenge by killing the entire family. Now you know this book isn’t going to have a saccharine sweet fairy tale ending, with everyone living happily ever after – but I did not expect the massive twists of the last few chapters – it was brilliant and perfect for the book. While you’re trying to process Grace’s most recent kill, Mackie’s already moved on to ranting about Pret and lip fillers.We’re obviously meant to be enthralled by Grace and impressed by her devious deeds, but she’s just completely detestable. I am lucky enough to be sent loads of advance review copies of books to read – often unsolicited from publishers. and the juicy details of her life along with the creative offing of six members of her family, she had me laughing out loud.

I relate to Grace more than I should probably admit, this is my favourite word for that very reason! How To Kill Your Family was described in the publisher’s blurb as “a wickedly dark romp about class, family, love” and “outrageously funny, compulsive and subversive. The combination of this lack of awareness and her reliance on improvisation and luck over planning and preparation took a lot of the tension out of the various killings that she committed.As a result of this, How To Kill Your Family is not a book full of blood, guts and gore, despite being about murder. The book wasn’t quite what I had expected, I had expected a bored housewife, but that is my own fault for not reading the blurb first! It’s a shame because How to Kill Your Family has such a good premise, but suffers from really bad execution. I also found the subplot of the crime she didn't commit (yet found herself in prison for) very predictable from an early stage.

After a few heavier reads and a rather hectic couple of weeks, I was longing to dive into a funny, comfort read. Having killed off six people — a few of them in gruesome circumstances in a sauna or a sex club — Grace shows little remorse. It’s written from the point of view of Grace Bernard who is in prison for a murder she didn’t commit. Maybe it isn’t perfect, but living out has been a staple of Oxford student life for decades, and it’s one of the only similarities it has to the typical student experience at any other university.I enjoyed the journal form, even though it made very little sense to me why Grace should ever want to commit to paper a full account of every murder she committed and so far got away with.