My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

I pulled out an envelope. A4, brown, unremarkable, unlabelled. Unsealed. Inside, there was something that felt like stiff paper. Out it came, for the first time in what must have been a long time, with a soft sound like the breathing of someone who has been deeply asleep, and is beginning to wake up.

‘What happened with Kitty doesn’t mean a thing. She was just there, that’s all.’ ‘What, as if by magic? She just appeared in your bed, like Aladdin’s genie?”

That face, more familiar to her than her own, was lifeless and perfectly still, and somehow smoother and younger than Edie had ever seen it. As if death was a kind of magic that had taken their mother right back into the past before leading her away.

He wore his clothes with a comfortable lack of self-consciousness that suggested he’d be just as much at ease wandering round naked.

All my life, I’d been caught between how things were and how other people wanted them to be.

The thing about marriage is, you become a convenient excuse for the other person. Anything they’re discontented about, they can blame on you, all the more so if they feel like they didn’t have much of a choice about getting hitched in the first place.

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My Review:

 

Ali Mercer has exceptional and compelling word voodoo. Her descriptions and perceptive observations fully immersed me in her complex characters’ realm, as if I were inhabiting their spaces alongside them. The storylines were well-paced, cunningly crafted, multifaceted, and held my rapt attention throughout as I never knew in what direction they might take.