The Playdate by Clara Dillon: A gripping school-gates thriller with a chilling, compelling protagonist

The first day at a new school is always difficult – who to avoid, who to befriend, what to wear – and that’s just the parents’ concerns. When Sara’s daughter Lexie starts at a new school in Dublin, Sara tries to smooth the transition by befriending the popular mothers. But infiltrating a spy cell would be easier than getting an invitation to the Beautiful Mothers’ (BMs) coffee mornings. When queen bee Vanessa unexpectedly needs someone to look after her daughter Polly, Sara seizes her opportunity. But disaster strikes when Polly is found lifeless in Sara’s back garden.

This is the set-up of Irish anaesthetist Clara Dillon’s debut novel. From this heart-pounding opening, we jump back in time as Sara relates the story of how things came to this point. The story is told in the second person, with Sara addressing her husband, Adam, directly. Adam has been commuting between Dublin and their old home in London while he gets his new business off the ground. It’s a risky device but Dillon pulls it off, and it only serves to increase the reader’s sense of uncertainty and dread.

In Sara, Dillon has created a wonderfully unreliable narrator as the reader wonders is she damaged, paranoid and imagining things or are her concerns about what appears to be happening perfectly reasonable?

Meanwhile, just enough of Adam’s London story is sprinkled between the main action to confuse the reader’s loyalties and to ratchet up the tension even further. The story is so tense at times as to be almost stressful; I couldn’t relax until I had reached its appalling but darkly thrilling conclusion, and so I read it in one sitting. It reminded me of Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal if perhaps it had been written by Harlan Coben, with elements of Patricia Highsmith.

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The Playdate is an incredibly gripping and entertaining page-turner, but it also asks some difficult-to-answer questions such as how far would you go to protect your child or how far-reaching is the damage wrought by bullies and cliques?

What sets this novel apart from the slew of school-gate novels is its unforgettable protagonist, Sara. Chilling, ambivalent, amoral and compelling, she brilliantly subverts our ideas of femininity and motherhood and will make you hesitate before RSVPing to your next play date.