 |
Publication date 8th February 2018 (hardback)
Kindle 23rd February 2017
400 pages
|
Four friends. Twenty years. One powerful secret.
Everyone remembers where they were on 31st August 1997, the day Princess Diana died.
Sophie, Emily, Amy and Melissa certainly do -– a beautiful cottage in Southwold, at the start of an annual tradition to have a weekend away together.
Every year since, the four best friends have come back together. But over time the changes in their lives have led them down very different paths. And it’s when those paths collide that the secrets they’ve been keeping come tumbling out.
One Day meets Big Little Lies in this unputdownable read about four friends, one long-buried secret and the histories we all share.
My thoughts:
This is an immensely readable book. Well drawn characters as diverse as you are going to get within a friendship group who meet at university, stay close friends yet go their own paths in life.
Sophie: the sensible, grown up one who meets her Mr Right, Steve, at uni, gets a good job, buys a house and has a baby who she struggles to bond with. Always the voice of reason among the group.
Melissa, the party girl who gets an exciting job in the music industry after uni and is forever getting herself into mischief and never settles down.
Amy: the bubbly, sparkly girl who finds an amazing, rich and charming partner in Nick. They get married and have an enviable life with a big house and all the trappings of a successful life together.
Emily: the quiet, studious, enigmatic one of the group. She finds herself pregnant shortly after uni and decides to set herself up as a single mum back at home with her parents with baby Jack. Nobody knows who his dad is although everyone has their suspicions.
I love the way the author has used events from the media to mark the passage of time throughout this book. You can really measure the scale of the time passing between the events yet they don't have any other significance within the story.
This is an excellent story of how each of the girl's lives pans out as an individual yet the bonds of true friendship tie them strongly together. They laugh together, argue amongst themselves even to the point of falling out quite spectacularly at more than one point yet there is something there that, when times get really tough for any one of them, the group pulls together to support each other.
There are some scenarios within the book which I doubted whether their friendship would survive and maybe in the real world they possibly wouldn't be able to get past but in true chick lit style girl power wins out in the end.
This is a fun read, maybe not 100% believable but well worth getting lost within its pages. I would definitely recommend it if you fancy a book where you don't need to work too hard on the plot - although there are a couple of surprises along the way just to keep you guessing.
About the author:
Helen Warner is a former Head of Daytime at both ITV & Channel 4, where she was responsible for a variety of TV shows including Come Dine With Me, Loose Women, Good Morning Britain and Judge Rinder. Helen writes her novels on the train to work in London from her home in Essex, which she shares with her husband and their two children.
No comments:
Post a Comment