Three Hours: The Top Ten Sunday Times Bestseller

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Lupton is skilled at entering a child’s mind, as well as a parent’s, and at showing how crisis and danger can change you and allow you to discover aspects of yourself and your child that you didn’t know were there. In Three Hours, a mother who's desperate to know if her son is safe remembers feeling jealous of his potential girlfriends the day before: “She’d had no idea then of the love she had for Jamie, had assumed it was possessive, grasping, but the make-up of her love is not like that at all.” This beautiful and sensitive story is narrated through the eyes of several main characters bringing a multi-layer human angle enabling the reader to watch the story unfold through so many different sides. Powerful, heavy topics are described; the fear, the tension, and suspense, but I was unable to engage with the characters, the emotions, and heroic acts of courage. After a promising beginning, this was a dramatic, topical story that plodded along and fell flat for me. Instead of feeling the drama, I became a detached observer. So many characters and perspectives were introduced that it was confusing to recall who everyone was and where they were located. I was not feeling connected with the characters in the way I wanted to be. I read about the actions of various teachers, the unbelievable calm of most of the school children, the helplessness of their parents, and the police proceedings. It's a brave and touchy topic to write about, especially considering the stories parallels to many events that have truly happened. The Columbine High School shootings come to mind, which adds an urgency to the narrative. Yes, it's fiction, but you keep reminding yourself that this could be happening for real. Because it has happened before.Three Hoursis a brilliant novel - moving, relevant and honest. Rosamund Lupton takes us through the story of a siege in an English school, building on the tension and our emotions as the story speeds to its conclusion. She handles difficult subjects with sensitivity and intelligence, focusing on the heroism of the individual. An exceptional and heartbreaking read Jenny Quintana Some of the ends are tied up a little too hastily and the denouement threatens to collapse under the weight of complicated plotting, but Three Hours is so immensely gripping that it carries you along with unstoppable verve. It's tumultuous, full of panic, but underlying it all is compassion. Rosamund Lupton may write about horror, but the message she wants to get across is a positive one. We see what strength it demands from people to survive a harrowing situation like that and we get to read about acts of selflessness and pure bravery. The school is a campus of multiple buildings located in woodlands on the Somerset coast and includes a junior school, a senior school, pottery building and a theatre. It has continued to grow from the 1920s adding new to old and now provides education to 14 years of student needs. Several teachers and students occupy each of the buildings and their stories are told with compelling fascination when threat and fear hang over their every move. The novel explores how different people react, some stepping forward in moments of courage and those that don’t. Despite the obvious tension, it was also tender in places and I found it heart wrenching reading about the fear of the children and the bravery of those trying to help. It perfectly displayed people’s capacity for good as well as bad.

BEST BOOKS of 2020 in the Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Times, Stylist, Red, Good Housekeeping It is early days, but this could be one of the thrillers of the decade. Intense, horrifying and brilliantly told... If you read only one thriller this year; make it this one: it is that good * Daily Mail * Devastatingly good, and announces the arrival of a truly original talent * Daily Mail on 'Sister' *

Customer reviews

Three Hours is Rosamund Lupton's best book yet, and that is high praise. A monster story for our fractious historical moment -- the age of the internet and of Columbine, of terror and mass migration -- when the monsters often look an awful lot like our own children. Chilling, suspenseful, humane, and brave William Landay

I read this book in one sitting I could not put it down. So beautifully written, the courage, love, compassion, vulnerability and sense of community in this book. It will be one of my favorite reads of this year. Rosamund Lupton begins this superb novel that could have been ripped from our troubled world's recent news headlines, with the above quote, for in the midst of the nightmare that descends on a rural Somerset school on a cold, dark and snowy November morning, teachers and children's lives are to be changed forever. Their courage, love, fortitude and sense of community rises to the surface as their innocence is shattered in the face of the worst of people riddled with the cancer of an all consuming hatred. Lupton drops the reader right slap bang into the middle of the terror of the school taken over by well armed gunmen, shooting the kind and compassionate Head, Matthew Marr, who is dragged into the library by students. It is the brave Rafi Burkhani, suffering PTSD, a casualty of war torn Syria, who recognises a small explosion in the wood as a bomb, informing the Head, driven by his love of his younger, emotionally damaged brother, Basi, and his need to save him and others. Rosamund Jane Lupton (née Orde-Powlett), is a British writer. She studied literature at Cambridge University. She is perhaps best known for her novels Sister, Afterwards, The Quality of Silence and Three Hours Early life and family [ edit ] A Good Read’ – BBC Radio 4 -Pippa Haywood, Felicity Montagu and host Harriett Gilbert discuss ‘Three Hours’ (go to 9.35 on the timer) https://tinyurl.com/ycx5xb8s But as a thriller it is as said tense, nail bitingly so and the sense of mixed claustrophobia with terror that the hostages feel is very real and very raw and powerfully describedPropulsively plotted and full of vivid characters who earn our concern, Three Hours held me in its eloquent grip -- Emma Donoghue, bestselling author of 'Room' Yes the story is ripped straight from a headline you hope never to see again. This has been done before you may say. No. Not like this. Not with this immersive level of quality in the prose, in the characters, in the overall impact of it. I cried for our society when I was done, I also believed in it.