You

 - By Caroline Kepnes

I should say that this random pick was one of the best I read in recent times. Oh Gosh, it is deliriously creepy, unbelievably sensual, impossibly addictive. By the very subtext of the novel, I should not have liked the book, let alone loved it.

Joe Goldberg is obsessed. The story is about his object of obsession, told from his perspective. Guinevere Beck, or Beck as she likes to be called is an aspiring writer, who has no clue about life, who has some serious issues and is selfish enough to use people to get to her objective. While browsing in Mooney bookstore, she catches the eye of Joe Goldberg, who works there and he is instantly obsessed with her. While ringing her bill at the counter, they flirt a little and Joe decides that she is THE ONE. From that moment on, he stalks her every minute - quite literally!! Active on networking sites - Twitter and Facebook, and into emails and texting more than calls, Beck provides an easy access to her personal life to anyone on the internet. And he swallows up the whole of her social networking and gets hold of her mobile phone on a freak encounter and hacks into her email and inserts himself into her life, creating a fabricated life that eventually makes her fall for him. Will she find out about his secret? How does he play the act of an innocent bystander, while all the while knowing more about her than he confesses? In that narrow walk on the tripwire, who trips first?

For a debut novel, Caroline Kepnes was brilliant in her story telling and her play of words. She told a compelling dark tale of obsession, that left me astounded at her audacity for creating a character (Joe Goldberg) that snuck into my mind and played havoc with right and wrong, while I rooted for him. I should have cursed him for existing, yet, I could not help but be absorbed into his mind and live in it. The obsession was like a weed, growing in my mind too and that is the beauty of the novel. The characters just grow on you. While other characters have good roles to play and are introduced via Joe's reading of Beck's emails, they all play an important role in the novel. No character is undeserved, no word is misplaced and the novel is constructed intelligently, to drive you to obsession, page by page.

You, by Caroline Kepnes is definitely worth a read!