The Wonder Lover (Malcolm Knox, A&U)

John Wonder is, on the surface, a very ordinary man. However, his work, as an assessor of remarkable facts and feats, sees him travel a lot and the reader discovers that Wonder actually has three homes in different cities and three wives and families, each with a son and daughter named Adam and Evie. Wonder is, it seems, slow to succumb to love, but once smitten falls very quickly into entanglements he can’t—or doesn’t want to—escape. But in the course of certifying his longest and most difficult ‘case’, Wonder makes a fatal mistake and falls in love for a fourth time in his life. The Wonder Lover is well-paced and easy to read, but once finished it leaves some niggles. Ultimately it is not at all emotionally convincing. This is not to say that any novel needs to be utterly realistic to be a satisfying read; rather, Malcolm Knox seems to be aiming at a sort of very slightly whimsical ‘enhanced realism’ and the attempt—for this reviewer at least—falls quite short. This is a book that will no doubt be widely reviewed and heavily promoted and will sell well on the back of that. But many readers may be left with serious qualms.

Tim Coronel is a freelance editor and publishing consultant, and a former publisher and editor of Books+Publishing