How to Kill Your Family

How to Kill Your Family is Bella Mackie's first-person revenge comedy about Grace Bernard, a woman who decides that a family who excluded her should pay for it. The pleasure is not in solving a puzzle. It is in watching Grace make her case, reveal the limits of her own self-knowledge, and mistake narration for control. HarperCollins lists the English edition under ISBN 9780008365936.

Netflix announced a series based on Mackie's novel with Anya Taylor-Joy attached. Read the book first if you want its brittle voice and its deliberately uncomfortable jokes before the story becomes a performance by someone else.

Grace Bernard narrates with charm, spite, and a large blind spot about herself.

The Artemis family are the wealthy relatives Grace believes owe her a place in their lives.

The people around Grace matter because they see less of her plan than she thinks they do.

No. 1 - A committed voice. Grace does not ask the reader to approve of her.

No. 2 - Social anger with teeth. Class resentment is part of the joke, not a lecture pasted onto it.

No. 3 - A useful read-before-watch choice. The adaptation can change events, but the book fixes the original point of view.

Read this if you are...

• Looking for a sharp, morally ugly comic thriller.
• Interested in an unreliable woman narrator.
• Planning to watch the Netflix adaptation.

Skip it if you are...

• Looking for a conventional whodunit.
• Sensitive to violence, murder, or cruelty played for dark humor.
• Wanting a sympathetic central character.

• Let Grace make her argument before deciding whether it holds up.
• Avoid detailed plot summaries. The book depends on what she leaves out.
• Treat the comedy as part of the menace, not relief from it.

• Patricia Highsmith - The Talented Mr. Ripley. For a charismatic narrator with an elastic conscience.
• Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl. For a colder domestic manipulation story.
• Bella Mackie - What a Way to Go. For readers who want more of Mackie's comic cruelty.

1. When does Grace sound most convincing?
2. What does the book suggest money can and cannot repair?
3. Which details does Grace turn into evidence for her own story?
4. How would a screen version handle her private voice?
5. Does the ending change your reading of her confidence?