Blackout by Marc Elsberg

A cold night in Milan, Piero Manzano wants to get home.
Then the traffic lights fail. Manzano is thrown from his Alfa as cars pile up. And not just on this street – every light in the city is dead.
Across Europe, controllers watch in disbelief as electricity grids collapse.
Plunged into darkness, people are freezing. Food and water supplies dry up. The death toll soars.
Former hacker and activist Manzano becomes a prime suspect. But he is also the only man capable of finding the real attackers.
Can he bring down a major terrorist network before it’s too late?

After reading the description for Blackout I immediately wanted to give it a read. The plot sounded both exciting and realistic, it could actually happen in real life. Now after reading it I can honestly say that it is definitely a book you will finish quite quickly because you will be completely hooked.

The story of Blackout is about several different characters experiences during the time when the power goes out. The characters are spread all around Europe, so you get an idea of how over countries are coping with the blackout. I don’t want to give to much away because this is the sort of book that you need to go in to without knowing too much to fully enjoy the book.

Before I started to read the book I didn’t know that it would be told from different characters perspectives, so it did catch me a little off guard when I was suddenly in a different country with a different character. I don’t mind reading books with many different perspectives but I did get a little confused with all the different characters at the beginning. I think what would of helped is if the different perspectives had some sort of order throughout the book, so you knew which one you would be reading next. Other than that I enjoyed reading the different character stories.

One of the great things about Blackout is that you are able to travel to many different countries within seconds and get to understand how this blackout has effected the different countries. I liked how you had a different character in each country to explain how they were coping with the blackout. Normally you get one character traveling to different countries and you only get that characters thoughts. However in Blackout because you get a whole range of characters you are able to see how wide the effects have spread and how the characters plan to deal with it.

You can tell that the author has taken his time doing research and writing the book because the writing is, full of information and brilliantly written. The author manages to write Blackout in such a realistic and believable way, that its hard not to get worried about something like this happening in real life. It makes you think about how would you and others cope in a situation like this. Every chapter is full of useful information that its hard to actually believe this is a story and not a non-fiction book. The authors writing does not get bogged down with information either, instead it is sprinkled around in the writing, rather than getting an overload of information all at once.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Blackout and I could definitely see this being turned into a film or a TV Series. It completely sucked me in from the very start and apart from the confusion with the different characters perspectives, it is a fast and easy read. I managed to read this book in a couple of sittings because I couldn’t put the book down. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read an original but realistic story that will keep you on the edge of your seat throughout.