As I stood at my own birthday party, listening to my husband’s speech about me, I could no longer silence the thought that had started as a low-level hum five years ago and built until I could no longer ignore it… did I want to leave him?

Steph has spent decades building a family with her husband Mal, and putting that family first. She is the glue that holds them all together and she has convinced herself that she’s been happy… most of the time. But as she stands at her birthday party watching her husband talking about a wonderful marriage she doesn’t fully recognize, the doubts that she has been pushing down for so long begin to grow…

After the party, as Steph tries to gather her courage to leave Mal, she receives a letter from her old friend Evie. Steph hasn’t spoken to Evie since a sunny weekend on a holiday beach twenty years earlier when the two friends said things to each other that could never be unsaid. And now, Evie is seeking a reunion and a way to repair the friendship. But this reunion threatens to reveal a secret that could destroy two families.

Other People’s Marriages is an absolutely unputdownable and heartbreaking read about the lies we tell to keep our loved ones close. Perfect for fans of Jodi Picoult, Liane Moriarty, and Diane Chamberlain.

 Favorite Quotes:

I didn’t want him to spend his life feeling that everyone else had cracked the code to their place in the world but he’d scribbled his on the back of an envelope he’d lost before he’d memorised it.

Gemma was so charming that even when she was sending someone to hell, she did it in such a way that they enjoyed the journey.

I both admired Teresa for being able to keep a secret and could have shaken her out of frustration. But that was Teresa all over. She was like one of those money boxes that you had to smash open to retrieve the cash.

Paul looked so disgusted with Wendy that, for a second, I had a brief flicker of fear that he’d divorce me just for being related to her.

I’d frequently found myself wondering how so much water could make its way to the eyes, puzzling as I cried into Gladys’s neck about where the liquid came from, imagining a little reservoir tucked behind my jaw like the one in my Mini for windscreen wiper fluid.

I was a woman to whom detail was everything – mainly, if I was honest, so I could store it and use it against people at a later date.

 My Review:

Kerry Fisher’s latest offering was brilliantly insightful and so perceptive that the characters’ realizations and inner musings often stung as she was poking at some of my own failings and secret resentments that seemed to be fighting their way to the surface and had me nodding in emphatically agreement during perusal. This wily scribbler bravely dug deep and rooted around among the secret longings, self-doubts, and resentful sacrifices of marriage and motherhood with surgical precision and cunning, while maintaining a perfect balance of painful awareness and craftily amusing and snarky observations. She also held a bright light on those thoughts and impressions we women tend to keep privately stashed away and don’t dare speak of for fear of being banned from the sisterhood and flogged in the public square. What guile!

The storylines and family issues were varied yet highly relatable with narratives that flowed smoothly and sucked me in with cleverly astute and wry wit along with a keenly discerning eye and brutal honesty for warts and all disclosures of the nitty-gritty as well as the damage of long-held secrets. She had my rapt attention and I loved her deeply flawed characters as they were so real to me I could hear them breathing. I bonded and identified the most with the bombastic and colorful Steph, as gasp, I saw far too much of myself under her skin. So much so, I had to wonder if Ms. Fisher was actually someone who knows me all too well and using a pen name. Perish the thought!