I found it a huge struggle to finish this book. I put it down three times and read the whole of another book instead. If it hadn’t have been featured in this year’s Booker Prize longlist I don’t think I would have bothered picking it up again.

Surprisingly, in the end, my opinion of it was fairly decent mostly because I did enjoy the last 150 odd pages and at that point I couldn’t put the book down. If I’d found the first 350 pages as turnable then it would have been much better (obviously).

I just found the story very slow to get off the ground. Basically it’s all about twins Gabriel and Isabella Glover: aged 30ish; split between London & New York; brought up by a distant English father and a Russian mother; both rather in need of having their lives sorted out. The book begins with the death of their mother in St Petersburg and the story flips around from chapter to chapter between Isabella, Gabriel, their father, a Russian man called Arkady and his English friend Henry. Although the links between the main characters are clear early on in the book for the longest time it seemed like I was switching between different stories. It was only in the later part of the book (where I was enjoying it) that it felt like one coherent story.

I’m glad I persevered to finish the book, and I can see why the author thought the story needed to be so spread out in the beginning in order that everything was set up for the ending, it just didn’t really suit me that way.