I Know This Much Is True - Wally Lamb

A while back, my sister and I decided to swap our favourite books. Amongst the stack (most of which, I have to say, I read with some wearisome disdain, having rather different taste) was Middlesex, which was great. There it is, I thought, the book we agree on. It was with some heaviness of heart that I hefted the 900 tiny print pages of Wally Lamb's doorstop and thought "I bet I'll hate this..." How wrong can one person get? Wally Lamb's 1998 New York Times Bestseller is a deceptively simple book. In many ways it's devoid of a plot as such. It is the story of Dominick Birdsey, forty-one years old, unhappily divorced and identical twin to ...

I know this much is true. I’d never heard of Wally Lamb, when I came across this book in my local nearly- new bookshop. It was the picture on the front that drew me in – it is a scene, in silhouette, of two boys, quite young running along an embankment with their dog. ( I don’t believe that the dog ever materialized in the story!!) This scene was very emotive; and the juxtaposition of two seemingly happy and carefree boys, and the darkness shown in the picture , struck me as intriguingly sinister. Since picking up this book. I discovered that Wally Lamb is one of Oprah Winfrey’s book club writers (she ...