The Gone Girl effect sparks year of women behaving badly

You may not like them, but the heroines of a clutch of new novels have a hold on us all and make for compelling reading

Just call it the Gone Girl effect. Following the success of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel and the recent acclaimed David Fincher-directed film adaptation, fiction in 2015 is set to be dominated by unreliable women.

From Rachel Watson, the unhappy heroine of British writer Paula Hawkins’s much-anticipated debut novel The Girl on the Train, to Anna Benz, the depressed wife at the heart of Jill Alexander Essbaum’s haunting Hausfrau, this year’s most compelling reads are all about lost girls, some of whom, like Flynn’s Amy Dunne, turn out to have a core of steel in their soul.

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