The Radleys: A Novel Kindle Edition

Matt Haig tells us right up front that "vampire" is "a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels." But for the very middle-class British Radleys, with their two children, the cliché is their life in hiding, a colorless droning buzz of hunger repressed and desires denied.Rowan Radley is an anemic teen with skin rashes, yearning for the courage to talk to his sister's friend Eva. Clara Radley's walls are covered with "Save the Whales" posters; she is a vegetarian whose only friend is the new girl at school, a beauty who she senses will probably not speak to her any more once she is fully accepted by the other students.Helen and Dr. Peter Radley are helpless to assist their children to fit in, any more than they can assimilate themselves. They are too busy hiding their nature, not only from the neighbors, but also from their children. They are Abstainers: vampires who refuse to drink blood.Despite years of residence in their quiet community, all four Radleys are simply existing day-to-day. Suffering, in a blunted, relentless way:"Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these "normal" human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? 'Course not. It's just the same. We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins."In a single brutal event at an overnight party, Clara will open the gates for all of the Radleys to revert to their true nature. And the advent of Uncle Will, a long-practising blood-drinker with the power to cloud men's minds, will at first seem a blessing. He can help them divert the attention of the police:"It is another unsolved mystery in a world full of unsolved mysteries. Now stand up and walk out the way you came, and the moment that fresh air caresses your face, you will realize that that is what makes the world so beautiful. All those unsolved mysteries. And you won't ever want to interfere with that beauty again."As always, though, when long-held feelings are repressed, they eventually burst forth with explosive power. The secrets the Radleys have been hiding go far beyond blood-drinking. And when they are no longer suppressed, the results will change the Radleys and everyone involved with them irrevocably.It's an intense novel, about much more than the girly cliché of vampire romance. This story is about living the life you were born to live, rather than the one defined for you by society. It's worth the read."That is what the taste of blood does. It takes away the gap between thought and action. To think is to do. There is no unlived life inside you as the air speeds past your body, as you look down at the dreary villages and market towns..."

It was advertised as a “dark comedy”. I didn’t laugh. It was a good novel, just not funny.

I was intrigued by this plot description, very different from the spate of other vampire films and books. So I gave it a try by getting the Kindle Sample. The beginning was quite clever and amusing, so I went ahead and bought the book.The plot was sufficiently interesting to keep me going, but unfortunately, between any action, there were countless pages of boring vampire lore, none of which was in the slightest interesting or germane to the plot. Why the author felt this was necessary I don't know, but possibly to satisfy the teenager vampire fans.Had this been edited out, the book would have been far better. Of course, that problem was solved by just quickly paging though these sections.A fun read, but not really worth the price.

Arrived on time. The book had no damage and almost no wear and tear.

This is a good book! It makes you sweat and feel and think. It isn’t a “normal” vampire book. I love that you could replace blood with any real vice and it would be the same story. I don’t like the way the point of view changes each chapter and usually within each chapter, I’m sure it is a personal preference, but it makes it hard for me to follow. I do like that it touches on depression from many different points of view, though.As much as I like this book, it does feel like something is missing. It feels a lot of an author finding himself. I have worked backwards from Matt Hair’s other books, so I know what his writing is like once he has found himself. I can’t really put into words what is missing. I think that the ending was written in a way to make a sequel possible, but I don’t think that there will be a sequel.But it really is a good read!

Such a fun, slightly funny, very clever and touching story about a family of vampires. Once I got into the book, about 20% through, I couldn't put it down and finished it in just a few days. Highly recommend! Another great one from Matt Haig.

Middle class British domesticity isn't what I would have thought the vampire genre needed, but it turns out to be just what's required.Haig paints a very believable portrait of middle class family life, complete with troubled teens of a very plausible sort, marital secrets and the malaise of a too-comfortable life.The book is relatively short but doesn't feel slight: The characters are so well-delineated and the writing is so lean that what would have taken Anne Rice twice as long to say, Haig does in little over 300 pages.Although there's some world-building here, he resists the temptation to create an almost unrecognizable mythological world inside his England. It's all very grounded, mostly sketched out through excerpts from a self-help book for vampire "abstainers" who no longer drink blood.For the first time in a long time, I find myself actually looking forward to the prospect of a sequel to a work of vampire fiction. Ironically, there don't seem to be any in the immediate offing, which probably speaks to the intent of the author to tell a good story, rather than to create a cash-generating franchise.Strongly recommended for adult fans of vampire fiction, particularly those tired of some of the more baroque or overstuffed competition.

There were only two bad things about this book. Firstly, I understood that vampires drank blood from each other (especially during love etc.) but it was unclear how vampires could survive only on vampire blood – that would seem to defy the laws of thermodynamics. (But hey, they’re vampires.)Secondly, in this book, vampires and the police lived in an uneasy co-existence. The uncle of the family, Will Radley, was apparently some kind of VIP, and on some list where could not be killed by the police. Now it's unclear how exactly he got there, or why he would stay there given that the guy is a bloodthirsty pyscho; I feel this point could have been better handled, and more simply, just by saying “Will was good at covering his tracks.”With those criticisms out of the way, I have to say that this story rocked. It *did* take a little while to pick up, but once it did, I was hooked. The characters are well-drawn, and I found most of them interesting (except the dad). The author has an excellent style: evocative, a little dry, and good at getting the reader into the characters’ heads.My only major complaint is that there wasn’t more!

Love every book of Matt Haig but this was really hard to finish.

Très bon livre, j’ai adoré

Storia intrigante e divertente

Not into vampires. But this was quite differentQuite enjoyed it. Very well written. I could see where it was heading but still very hard to predict outcomesKept me in suspence