Three hours is 180 minutes or 10,800 seconds.

It is a morning’s lessons, a dress rehearsal of Macbeth, a snowy trek through the woods.

It is an eternity waiting for news. Or a countdown to something terrible.

It is 180 minutes to discover who you will die for and what men will kill for.

In rural Somerset in the middle of a blizzard, the unthinkable happens: a school is under siege. Told from the point of view of the people at the heart of it, from the wounded headmaster in the library, unable to help his trapped pupils and staff, to teenage Hannah in love for the first time, to the parents gathering desperate for news, to the 16 year old Syrian refugee trying to rescue his little brother, to the police psychologist who must identify the gunmen, to the students taking refuge in the school theatre, all experience the most intense hours of their lives, where evil and terror are met by courage, love and redemption.

 

I love Rosamund Lupton’s writing so I was thrilled to get a copy of her forthcoming novel Three Hours. I have to be honest and say that I found this book very difficult to read, it’s such an intense subject matter but it is very well-written.

The novel starts off with a small explosion outside a school and from there we find out that there is at least one gunman inside part of the school. The police frantically try to work out what exactly is going on and who is behind this and what their motive is, and inside the school the teachers and students try to find safe places to hide.

The writing is so good that I felt really claustrophobic as the book went on, it was as if I was in the midst of this terror myself. I commend the writing but it meant I had to keep putting the book down because it was making me feel so anxious and tense.

There was a point about halfway through the book as we start to understand more about what is going on in the school and it felt more about trying to figure out who the perpetrator was and this is when the book became something I just couldn’t seem to put down. I was gripped by the investigation and by the way Lupton has woven real life shootings and terrorist attacks within her novel in such a sensitive way that it really made this story feel very real to me.

By the last section of the book I was on the edge of my seat wanting to know if everyone was going to survive this attack. I was convinced that the characters I’d come to really care about were not going to make it out alive and the tension was palpable as I was willing the police on to get to them in time. I was reading this last section right before bed and I couldn’t sleep for ages after I finished reading because of all the adrenaline.

Three Hours isn’t an easy read but it is a book worth reading. It’s a book that really gets under your skin and makes you think!

Three Hours is due to be published on 9th January and can be pre-ordered here.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. All thoughts are my own.