REVIEW:

Readers in the U.S. have really been loving The Love of My Life. I get it. Rosie Walsh’s latest novel is full of twists and turns, and I never was fully certain where the story would go.

Because Leo's wife has had a brush with death (from cancer… the publisher blurb just mentions an “illness”), he looks into her past. He's an obituary writer and just can’t help himself from starting hers just in case. What he learns is that she’s not who he thought she was, and she’s got a whopper of a secret (or two or three!) in her closet.

Where I struggled a bit was with the tone. Is the novel a slow-burn family drama? Or a domestic thriller? It felt a little like what you’d get if Anne Tyler and Lisa Jewell decided to co-author something. Comparison to either of those two writers is far from a bad thing, but I’m not sure they’d make great collaborators.

Chapters primarily alternate between the first person perspectives of the husband and wife, so the audiobook is narrated by Imogen Church and Theo Solomon. They both did a fine job, though even at 1.75x speed it felt longer than it needed to. I was eager to get to the end to see the plot’s resolution and also to move on with my life.

Side note that I’m adding in because if/when I look back on this review I want to remember something. The book ends with a fart. Yep, a fart. Despite the absence of laughs or really any levity throughout the entire novel, the story concludes with a character tooting (“breaking wind”) and blaming it on a moped. Alrighty then!

My thanks to Macmillan UK Audio for the gifted advance listening copy to review via NetGalley. The Love of My Life is now available in the US and will be published in the UK on June 23, 2022.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Ghosted comes a love story wrapped in a mystery: an up-all-night page-turner with a dark secret at its core.

I have held you at night for ten years and I didn't even know your name. We have a child together. A dog, a house.

Who are you?

Emma loves her husband Leo and their young daughter Ruby: she’d do anything for them. But almost everything she's told them about herself is a lie.

And she might just have got away with it, if it weren’t for her husband’s job. Leo is an obituary writer; Emma a well-known marine biologist. When she suffers a serious illness, Leo copes by doing what he knows best – researching and writing about his wife’s life. But as he starts to unravel the truth, he discovers the woman he loves doesn’t really exist. Even her name isn’t real.

When the very darkest moments of Emma’s past finally emerge, she must somehow prove to Leo that she really is the woman he always thought she was . . .

But first, she must tell him about the other love of her life.