Harbour

By: John Ajvide Lindqvist

Narrated by: Julian Rhind-Tutt.

Length: 19 hrs

Publisher's summary

From the author of the international best seller Let the Right One In.

They only stopped watching her for a matter of minutes. That was all it took.

It was a beautiful winter's day. Anders, his wife and their feisty six-year-old, Maja, set out across the ice of the Swedish archipelago to visit the lighthouse on Gavasten. There was no one around, so they let her go on ahead. And she disappeared, seemingly into thin air, and was never found.

Two years later, Anders is a broken alcoholic, his life ruined. He returns to the archipelago, the home of his childhood and his family. But all he finds are Maja's toys and through the haze of memory, loss and alcohol, he realizes that someone - or something - is trying to communicate with him.

Soon enough, his return sets in motion a series of horrifying events which exposes a mysterious and troubling relationship between the inhabitants of the remote island and the sea.

©2011 John Ajvide Lindqvist (P)2010 WF Howes Ltd

Critic reviews

"This is a third consecutive masterpiece from an author who deserves to be as much a household name as Stephen King." (SFX Magazine)

"A terrifying supernatural story yet also a moving account of friendship and salvation." (The Guardian, on Let the Right One In)

"A magician of genre fiction." (The Independent, on Harbour)

Not my style

This book could have had so much potential but the plot went no where. The narrator made the book listenable. However, the ending was very flat.

Suspenseful Horror

I thoroughly enjoyed “Let the Right One In” by John Ajvide Lindqvist and as Harbour is based around the folklore of the sea, an area of particular interest, I could not resist downloading it. I must admit it would have been more suspenseful had I not realised when I got to the end, initially, that the last six hours of the book had been omitted from Audible's version; however the missing six hours were restored a few months later, and I was finally able to listen through to the actual end of the book.

I enjoyed the narration by Julian Rhind-Tutt, whose calm voice held back the urge for this listener to race towards the end. The audio was clear and without fault, once the entire book was in place.

Harbour combines suspense, thriller and horror in one story set in the small, island community of Domarö, where Anders lost his daughter in mysterious circumstances years earlier. He returns in a alcoholic haze as the secrets of the community and the island start to unravel, flitting back and forth between past and present, yet all being revealed in a kind of perfect order.

I did enjoy it, but there were some scenes which I found too explicit; and I now feel my flirtation with horror is now at an end. I only gave the storyline 3 stars because I was slightly disappointed by supernatural aspect, which appeared to be confused, and somewhat "glossed-over" nearing the end; actually I felt a little cheated by that.