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'''Waterstones New Year Book Club 2016''' Sophie Stark wasn't born Sophie Stark - that's the person she decided to become. She didn't know that she wanted to become a film director either, but that is what she evolved into as she fought being the one who was different, as she tried to fit in but found that making movies actually drove her away from people. She was a genius when it came to making movies, but genius scythes through other people in pursuit of perfection, leaving disaster casually in its wake and Sophie was no exception to ‘''that'' rule.
Her story is told be the six people who loved her most, but who were the ones most affected by her life. Knowing genius must be a privilege, but it would be difficult for these people to feel that the privilege balanced out the negative effects of knowing Sophie Stark. Allison would later say that the months before Sophie came back to her were some of the happiest in her life. She'd originally encountered Sophie when she was telling a story at a club and Sophie spotted her potential as an actress. The connection wasn't purely professional and Allison recalls how they became lovers.
The Story is then taken up by Robbie, the brother brought up by Sophie, although the reverse might also have been true. Their father was dead and their mother ‘young 'young and sad and indecisive'. Knowing Sophie was never easy; being related to her even less so, particularly when Sophie began stalking one of the most popular boys in school - with a camera. The result was the start of her career. Then the story is taken up by Jacob, the man whose life she pilfered for the material for her greatest work and who never really understood why he married her, Daniel, the man she stalked, George, the movie producer who had the script for Sophie's last movie and R Benjamin Martin, the reporter who covered her work.
The delight is in the slight differences between the individual versions of the story, the assumptions you make when you read one version and the shock when you hear about it from a different angle - and they all ring so true. What is constant though is the use that's made of people for their stories, their experiences which can be built into a movie - and the way that they are discarded when their use is over.
The publishers compare the book to [[Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple]], [[We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler]] and [[A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan]]. I did wonder if they were tempting fate, but having read the book I think they're spot on.
{{toptentext|list=Top Ten Literary Fiction Books of 2015}}
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