2. I put a lot of quotes into this review to give you a sample of the writing and direction this book went in. I did my best to pick quotes that were meaningful to the story but did spoil the hidden surprises.
3. To me spoilers are subject to one’s own opinion, what may entice and intrigue some into learning more may ruin the story for others. I have not revealed what I’d consider spoilers in this review towards this book. But as always when reading a review, read with caution.
“May the most you wish for be the least you get.”
As soon as I saw this book on Goodreads, it was like finding a soul-mate I knew right away I HAD to have this book, I believed I would love it and I was not disappointed. I cried a lot during this book and executed it in under 24 hours.
The book starts with a prologue a year after Olivia aka Liv’s husband Luca, has passed away from a tragic car accident. She has fled the hometown where she grew up with Luca back to London where they once fled to many years ago.
The book goes back and forth from the childhood Liv shared with Luca and his twin brother Marc along with three other brothers. To the year after Luca’s death where; Liv spent in their hometown to be close to where Luca is buried.
Liv’s got a bad rapport with Luca’s mom Angela, Marc’s wife Nathalie and her own mother. Luca was Liv’s world and now she is shutting the world out, Luca’s twin brother Marc is also having a hard time coping with his brothers death along with emotions from the past. Marc and Liv are looking to grieve, looking for comfort and solace. The closets thing Liv has to Luca is his twin brother that reminds him of her late husband and the closest thing Marc has to his brother is the love of his brothers life Liv. The two embark in an unplanned affair in efforts to work out their grief.
The Liv in the past looks up to her older sister Lynnette (a model citizen)and in missing her while she off at University in London, stuck with her holy-than-thou mother and judgmental boyfriend, Liv starts seeking attention by other means along with her goodie two-shoes harlot in training best friend Anneli.
Liv in present time does not know where to go from loosing Luca. Always felt unloved and unwelcomed form Luca’s family, not all of them mainly the mother Angela and Nathalie, whom want nothing but for Liv to go back to London and fade away from their lives permanently. Liv tries to find a life without Luca taking on a job as a copywriter to a professor with his own past demons and forges unlikely friendships with some locals.
I had a lot of questions that were not answered but left open ended, for the reader to interpret, but all the major questions were answered: Why do Angela and Nathalie hate Liv so much? What havoc could or did Liv reap when she was younger? Could Marc be the ultimate substitute for Luca? What Liv and Marc are doing is it love or loneliness and grief? Can Liv move on after experiencing such a tragic loss of love? Will the affair blossom or blow up in their faces and destroy more lives?
Quotes:
“I can’t recall any of the words the minster said at the graveside, but when the coffin came to be lowered, he gave me the gentlest word of encouragement to throw the rose I was holding into the hole. I had to look at it then and that’s when the grief came over me like a wave. I don’t think I made a sound as I stood there in my high heels and my new coat and my silver earrings but inside, every hope and wish miscarried into bloody little disasters inside me.”
“I knelt down at the head of the grave and tidied the soil, as if it were Luca’s hair.
‘Darling, I’m back,’ I whispered. ‘I’m just down the hill there.’ I closed my eyes and tried to summon up my husband, but I couldn’t reach him. I was calm, but there was a thought inside my head. I imagined scraping away at the soil with my hands, digging down to Luca, opening the coffin, climbing in beside him and just lying there, watching the sky change color. Looking out into the universe like a tiny dot at the eyeglass end of a huge telescope.
Around were thousands upon thousands of headstones, every one commissioned by somebody who had been left behind. The grief of all these abandoned husbands and wives, parents and children lapped at my ankles. It was a lake, a sea. And beyond Arcadia Vale was a whole ocean of death and loss and grief. It was unbearable. How could a world have evolved where such sadness was the inevitable result of love? There was a spasm in my heart and I thought: Yes, I will bring tablets and gin and I’ll dig down to Luca and I’ll lie there and watch the sky and that’s how they’ll find me.”
Marc: ‘I’ve cried so many tears you’d think I’d be all cried out by now.’
Liv: I gave a little smile. ‘I know.’
Marc: ‘Do people keep telling you it’ll get easier?’
Liv: ‘I don’t talk to people.’
Marc: ‘That’s a sensible approach. I’ve heard enough well-meaning but totally bloody inane condolences to fill a book.’
Liv: He was SO like Luca
“Marc was almost the same size and shape as Luca, he smelled like Luca, he swore like Luca, he tipped his head back to laugh like Luca, he was the closest thing in the world to Luca and I was longing for Luca like a moth longs for the moon.”
“Marc and I sat together on the settee and drank our tea. I leaned my head on his shoulder and he kissed my hair softly. ‘Do we need to talk about this?’ he whispered. ‘I’d rather not.’ ‘Thank God it’s you,’ he said. I knew what he meant.”
“Days later, when I could bear my own company no longer and was desperate for distraction, I set out for a friendly-looking café I’d noticed a few streets away. But I didn’t check as I crossed the road and stepped out almost straight into the path of a car. The driver wound down the window and called me a stupid fucking ignorant bitch and made an obscene gesture. That encounter made me feel so hollow and shaky that all I could do was turn round and get back into my flat as fast as I could.”
“’She called him a poor bent, pale, old creature, wheezy of chest and rheumy of eye, more slumped than seated in a bath chair in the shade of a fine plum tree where he could enjoy the scent of the roses’, said the professor. ‘Not exactly a sex god, then.’ I said. ‘No. She was sure that he didn’t even know who she was and apparently, confused her with his servant girl and scolded her for asking him questions.’ ‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘Poor Marian.’ ‘Oh, I shouldn’t feel too sorry for her,’ said the professor, opening his car door. ‘If she hadn’t come to Portiston, she wouldn’t have found her true love.’ ‘I thought she died a spinster?’ ‘Ah, hah,’ said the professor, giving me one of his rare and beautiful smiles. ‘You haven’t reached the end of the story yet.’”
“’Are you coming to bed, darling?’ I would whisper. For some perverse reason I preferred to think of him coming to bed in one of his ruthless moods.”
“We talked for a while longer. Marc said he felt calmer. We said our good-nights, we whispered endearments. It was so late that there was already the faintest whiff of light in the sky beyond my curtainless window. I reached under my bed for the bottle of gin, poured an inch or so into my glass and swigged it down. I knew I would suffer at work in the morning, but I wanted something to take the edge off my guilt so that I could go back to sleep wrapped in the arms of the promise of a whole weekend without loneliness.”
“We never talked. We never had time. We had no mobile phones, we had no opportunity, we had no privacy, but nothing deterred us from being together as often as we could. Afterwards, everyone assumed we had been plotting and planning, but that simply wasn’t true. I never considered the future. I was just greedy for the present because I thought that was all I was ever going to have.”
“Meanwhile the professor was his usual quite, shadowy self. He paid me a small kindness and compliments, but always in a manner that suggested he was going through the motions. He didn’t try to persuade me to talk about myself and he didn’t mention his own experience again, for which I was grateful. I had never met anybody before who moved so effortlessly amongst people, but who gave away so little of himself. It was as if he shed no skin, exhaled no carbon dioxide and left no fingerprints. One day, I thought, maybe there would be a time when it would be right to talk. In the meantime, he didn’t pry beneath any of my rocks. At work there was no anxiety. The big, light, untidy office was heaven to me and to the professor too.”
“’It’s going to be OK,’ he said, squeezing my fingers. ‘We are going to be happy. Really, really happy. We are going to be the happiest runaways on the planet.’ He was right.”
“The professor cupped his glasses. ‘Grief is an illness. Different people respond to it in different ways. And they find different ways treating the symptoms.’ I picked a spring of lavender and crushed it beneath my fingers. It scented the warm air. ‘It’s like a virus,’ he said, warming to his theme. ‘Once it’s in your blood you can’t fight it and there is no cure. You just have to travel with it and see where it takes you.’
‘So how long have you been on your own?’
‘Ten years.’
‘Ten years? And you’re still not cured?
The professor sat down on a curved stone bench and held his glasses between his knees and watched the beads of water from the fountain tumble and dance as they fell. A smile turned up the edges of his lips.
‘I sound a bit self-indulgent, don’t I?’
‘Just a bit.’
‘I should get over myself, shouldn’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘I appreciate your honesty, Olivia.’
‘Anytime, professor, anytime.’”
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