A Sociopath’s Guide To A Successful Marriage

I still buy and read books, although I much prefer to idle a few hours away on the iPad with the Kindle app, reading what is on offer via Kindle Unlimited (my preference is for Sharpe and Hornblower imitations about the Napoleonic War).

Browsing physical books in an actual bookshop is still a simple and real pleasure for me, one which I do not envisage ever giving up.

Recently, when browsing in QBD at Highpoint West, I came across a new release called ‘A Sociopath’s Guide To A Successful Marriage’.

With a title like that, I had to buy it, and I greatly enjoyed it, with the tension and black humour building as I got further into the book.

One very small detail which stood out for me, which really sets this book apart, is that the first husband (and victim) of the narrator happens to be an Australian, who is first introduced to us wearing a Western Bulldogs cap.

As this happens to be my team (and as we won today, I happened to have noticed that a few people besides myself were wearing such caps when out and about), I am pretty chuffed about this little detail. I have gone as far as contacting the author via instagram to ask what caused him to add this little detail, as it is very intriguing to me, but alas, no response.

I doubt that this book will be studied by scholars in the decades to come, with no Penguin Classic annotated edition to come out, so I expect that this question will remain unanswered.

But I suspect that this is the first time that, outside of Australia, any mention of the Western Bulldogs will have made it into literature, even the crime noir variety.