years, shipwrecks have washed up on the shore, empty with no sign of life and more recently, a sheep has appeared in their yard.

The specific episode discussing the book has not yet aired as of mid-May 2022, (NOTE: These are only available for listening in the United Kingdom) but you can watch for it in the list of Between the Covers episodes here. It’s all very The Handmaid’s tale although we never find out what the rules are exactly and why they are in place. The book is short and very pacy, with a lot in it to hold my interest and I finished it in two sessions on a particularly long train journey.She is desperate to learn the fate of their son, Max, and fears her husband may be keeping this knowledge to himself. I played a game as a child once where you could only see two cms around you at any one time and you had to navigate blindly really through a maze. The sudden appearance of a token sheep also throws things off kilter where, as readers, we are left pondering its significance. I cannot help but think that the premise of this novel is metastatic where even feelings about feelings are involved.

Ottessa Moshfegh deems that within good fiction, “you feel shaken, ‘woken up’, affected“ as a reader. Perhaps idealistic images of ‘Castaway’, ‘The Beach’ and ‘Desert Island Discs’ came rushing before I’d read Metronome. Whitney and Aina and their former friends appear to remember a time before the invasive restrictions that have come to determine their lives and futures, yet they remain curiously, almost determinedly passive.

The only thing that appears is a lone sheep - which leads to Aina becoming suspicious that they are not in fact on an island as she believes sheep cannot swim. Employing Aina’s analytical brain, it is ubiquitous, represents a dozen, is an unusually highly composite number, divisible by itself, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. Their parole is due and they expect the Warden to come and free them, but he doesn't appear and Aina takes matters into her own hands. This gives an insight into the desperation of the parents, then the discovery and removal to remote Long Sky Croft. In Metronome, determination exposes any flaws or attributes that Whitney and Aina (which means always) might have.