A Ladder to the Sky

A Ladder to the Sky 

By John Boyne
Published: Hogarth, 2018
Pages: 384
Genre: Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction
Amazon, Goodreads

Everyone has secrets. There's something in all our pasts that we wouldn't want revealed. And that's where you'll find your story.

About the book

Maurice Swift is handsome, charming, and hungry for fame. The one thing he doesn’t have is talent – but he’s not about to let a detail like that stand in his way. After all, a would-be writer can find stories anywhere. They don’t need to be his own. 

Working as a waiter in a West Berlin hotel in 1988, Maurice engineers the perfect opportunity: a chance encounter with celebrated novelist Erich Ackermann. He quickly ingratiates himself with the powerful – but desperately lonely – older man, teasing out of Erich a terrible, long-held secret about his activities during the war. Perfect material for Maurice’s first novel. 

Once Maurice has had a taste of literary fame, he knows he can stop at nothing in pursuit of that high. Moving from the Amalfi Coast, where he matches wits with Gore Vidal, to Manhattan and London, Maurice hones his talent for deceit and manipulation, preying on the talented and vulnerable in his cold-blooded climb to the top. But the higher he climbs, the further he has to fall…

Review

Maurice Swift is a pompous asshole who commits atrocious acts of emotional abuse in the name of ambition, so he can do what he believes what he was born to do: write. Even though Maurice is a terrible, inconceivably vile character, A Ladder to the Sky is a book I could not put down. I ate this story in an entire day. There's something about Maurice that's like a horrible car accident - you just can't look away.


A Ladder to the Sky is essentially a sociopath's rise to fame and eventual downfall. What makes the story work so well is how it's split into different sections with different perspectives. We first catch a glimpse of Maurice through Erich's eyes: a sexy young man who seduces him into telling him his darkest secret. Maurice, being the psycho he is, uses this to his advantage to make a name for himself. An awful and morally questionable thing to do, but still not TERRIBLE terrible.

As the story progresses to Edith's point of view, readers begin to see more of Maurice's dark side and, at the conclusion of this section, know what Maurice really is. And it just gets darker from there. 

By setting up the story this way and using these separate point of views, the author does an excellent job of slowly uncovering Maurice's deadly ambitions. While I believed it to be slow at first, the book quickly picks up pace and left me nearly breathless at the end. 


A Ladder to the Sky is easily one of my favorite books of 2019 and I can see why it's getting critical acclaim. It's a fantastic read and it's a story that will always stay with you.

RATING (out of five puppies)