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The Kellerby Code by Jonny Sweet: A Book Club Discussion

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About the Book

In a world he can’t afford, Edward is just about getting by. He spends his days scurrying after his friends, doing everything to prove his value. But not to worry; the attention of his beloved Stanza and the respite he finds in her ancestral home, Kellerby House, provide all the reward he needs.

Until he realises that Stanza is in love with his best friend, Robert, forcing Edward to re-evaluate what those closest to him are actually worth. No price is too high to stop the life he has strived for slipping from his grip. Especially when he won’t be the one paying.

Format: Paperback (384 pages) Publisher: Faber and Faber
Publication date: 27th February 2025 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Crime

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The Discussion

The Kellerby Code was the April pick of the book club run by Waterstones in Reading.

Everyone agreed the book was very funny. As you’d expect from an author who started out as a comedian, there are great one-liners, witty dialogue and acerbic observation. For example, when Edward is introduced to one of Stanza’s schoolfriends, Dinita.

They were told immediately that she was heading up inclusivity, diversity and outreach at Hendepul, a global television firm, and that her employers didn’t at all understand black youth. Dinita had moved to London from Iran, where her father was involved in oil, been educated at public school and now lived in a large house in Notting Hill, but still: ‘These people just do not understand the average immigrant experience.’

There are some very amusing scenes. One I’d pick out is a dinner party hosted by Robert at which, as a parlour game, each guest is handed a folded piece of paper describing a personality trait or conversational tic they must perform. At the end of the evening others must guess what it was. Edward adopts his given persona so enthusiastically it causes alarm to other guests. However, there was a point in the book (involving a horse) where people felt the humour tipped over into absurdity.

Quite a few of us found pretty much all the characters unlikeable. Personally that meant I couldn’t really care what happened to them whilst others absolutely rejoiced in a book with so many unlikeable characters. There were mixed opinions about Edward. Some felt sorry for him. Others (me included) felt his original actions had unintended consequences meaning he increasingly lost control of events. One person, drawing on the comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s character Ripley, thought Edward was a portrait of a psychopath. And they had a point because events turn increasingly macabre with Edward displaying an unexpected, or perhaps up until now repressed, capacity for violence.

The author is a devotee of P. G. Wodehouse and there are plenty of nods to the Jeeves stories. For example, Edward’s surname is Jevons and he acquires a sort of inner voice he names Plum, which was Wodehouse’s nickname. Edward performs butler-like duties for his friends, Robert and Stanza, such as picking up their dry cleaning, organising birthday presents and preparing meals. Desperate to retain Robert’s friendship, he’s happy to act as ‘fixer’ but the problems he’s asked to tackle for Robert go way beyond anything Jeeves might have had to sort out for Bertie Wooster. And although Bertie may have been hapless at least he was amiably hapless. I felt Robert was completely self-absorbed, sucking up to Edward when he needed something and then ghosting him when it was done, or even denying he’d asked Edward to do it in the first place.

I was surprised, bearing in mind the cover, that Kellerby House doesn’t actually feature much until near the end of the book and that, considering his supposed devotion to the place, Edward’s final act seems rather bizarre. There was a lot of discussion about the ending which I’m not going to detail here but safe to say there are a few ways you could interpret it and the motivations of those involved.

Our discussions often lead to thoughts about similarities to other books. People came up with (obviously) The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith but also The Secret History by Donna Tartt and the film ‘Saltburn’.

Although I was more lukewarm about The Kellerby Code than some other book club members, I still found a lot to enjoy in it. It was definitely a great choice for a book club because it provoked a lot of different views. In fact, the discussion could have gone on for much longer than the allotted hour.

The Kellerby Code is an entertaining mystery/thriller with a generous helping of black comedy. If you’ve seen the film ‘Wicked Little Letters’ (for which the author wrote the screenplay) you’ll have an idea what to expect.

About the Author

Author Jonny Sweet

Jonny Sweet started out winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer in 2009, and in the intervening years, his work as a writer and actor has been varied and exceptional. His first feature was Wicked Little Letters, starring Olivia Coleman and Jessie Buckley. Alongside writing and acting, he develops and produces TV and film through his award-winning company People Person Pictures. The Kellerby Code is his debut novel. (Photo: Amazon author page)

Book Review – The Secret History by Donna Tartt

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About the Book

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and for ever.

Format: Audiobook (22h 4m) Publisher: Penguin
Publication date: 30th September 2010 [1992] Genre: Thriller

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My Review

I first read this when it was published in paperback in 1993 but I was given an opportunity to reread it when it was picked by my book club as a change from the new releases we usually choose. Like me, many book club members came along clutching their own battered copies of the book. I decided to listen to the audiobook as it is narrated by the author. I have to say she does a brilliant job of bringing the characters she created to life.

The Secret History is a long book and it isn’t until about the half way point that the murder (which we know pretty much from the beginning will take place) occurs. But somehow the author manages to keep the tension going through those first three hundred pages as our narrator, Richard Papen, describes the events that lead up to the murder and then its aftermath.

Newly arrived at Hampden College in Vermont, Richard becomes part of a group of students studying Ancient Greek under the tutelage of classics professor Julian Morrow, who limits enrolment in his classes to a hand-picked coterie. Unlike Richard, the other five – Henry, Francis, Bunny and twins, Camilla and Charles – come from privileged backgrounds. Richard is dazzled by them but finds himself amongst people who, unlike him, don’t have to worry where the next dollar will come from. This results in him having to tell elaborate lies about his background and hide his penury, even if that means nearly freezing to death during a Vermont winter. Bunny, although his parents are rich, has been cast adrift as a kind of challenge to make his own way in the world, his response to which is to sponge off his well-off friends.

This is not a story where you find yourself rooting for any of the characters; they’re all pretty unlikeable, including the victim. If I had to pick the least unlikeable it would be Francis who does act most like a true friend to Richard. The group indulge in a hedonistic lifestyle of wild parties, drink and drugs. Not much study seems to go on. Their willingness to see themselves as outside normal moral boundaries results in a series of shocking events which finds them increasingly needing to lie and deceive others. Richard willingly goes along with them because of his desire to remain part of the group. The author shows us how their actions leave them, in different ways, irrevocably damaged by the act of having taken another’s life.

Immersive is an often overused word but it’s fully justifiable as a description of The Secret History, the book which effectively gave rise to the dark academia literary genre.

In three words: Dark, suspenseful, compelling
Try something similar: If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio

About the Author

Author Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt is an American author who has achieved critical and public acclaim for her novels, which have been published in forty languages. In 2003 she received the WH Smith Literary Award for her novel, The Little Friend, which was also nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch. (Photo: Goodreads)