She loses her sense of self while pretending to be this enigmatic woman and when Leila starts to interact with one of Tess’s ex boyfriends, the lines between the two women become blurred.
The relationship between Tess and Leila is an intriguing one and as Leila gets to know every detail of Tess’s life, she not only comes to identify with her, but thinks that she can become her. And what of Adrian Dervish? What part has he been playing in this dangerous charade? There are two timelines in the book – one that follows Laila’s planning with Tess before her disappearance and another in the present day where Laila is looking for Tess in a commune in Spain, hinting that not everything has gone to plan. Leila and Tess must spend time together online so that Leila can learn her backstory, family, friends, likes, dislikes and speech patterns to successfully impersonate Tess online after she is gone – answering emails, updating Facebook and suggesting that Tess has gone to live abroad.
Beautiful, hypnotic and impulsive, she also lots of friends, boyfriends but is also bi-polar and this has led to her decision to kill herself. He will pay her to pretend to be a woman called Tess online for at least six months to cover up Tess’s impending suicide and spare Tess’s family the pain of losing her.Īs concepts go, it’s an unbelievable one, both in fiction and in real life, so it is to Moggach’s credit that, initially, the novel is completely intriguing. Soon she is approached by the site-owner Adrian Dervish who has a proposition for her. She spends her days testing software at home to make ends meet, but finds a new outlet when she joins the website Red Pill, a philosophical discussion group, where she soon becomes recognised as an ‘elite thinker’. Socially inept, she struggles to hold down a job and has few friends, a situation exacerbated by her inability to navigate social media.
Leila is a lonely young woman who is living in a scummy flat above an Indian restaurant following the death of her mother.
0 kommentar(er)
