Eden Fox, an artist on the brink of her big break, sets off for a run before her first exhibition. When she returns to the home she recently moved into, Spyglass, an enchanting old house in Hope Falls, nothing is as it should be. Her key doesn’t fit. A woman, eerily similar to her, answers the door. And her husband insists that the stranger is his wife.
One house. One husband. Two women. Someone is lying.
Six months earlier, a reclusive Londoner called Birdy, reeling from a life-changing diagnosis, inherits Spyglass. This unexpected gift from a long-lost grandmother brings her to the pretty seaside village of Hope Falls. But then Birdy stumbles upon a shadowy London clinic that claims to be able to predict a person’s date of death, including her own. Secrets start to unravel, and as the line between truth and lies blurs, Birdy feels compelled to right some old wrongs.
My Husband’s Wife is a tangled web of deception, obsession, and mystery that will keep you guessing until the last page. Prepare yourself for the ultimate mind-bending marriage thriller and step inside Spyglass – if you dare – to experience a story where nothing is as it seems.
So I’m back with a second Alice Feeney, as promised. This book was definitely better and didn’t make me pull my hair out with the ending. It still left me underwhelmed, but not disappointed and frustrated like last time.
Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.
Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there. . . but his wife has disappeared.
A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible — a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.
Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t. Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.
I wasn’t totally familiar with Alice Feeney’s work previously, but at the bookstore it seems like she does have quite the selection. Anyway, glad to have picked this up, although ultimately it wasn’t the kind of book for me.
Beautiful Ugly mostly takes place on a tiny (isolated) Scottish island, where our protagonist, Grady, goes to try to finally write a book to get his life back on track. His wife Abby had disappeared over a year ago one night, mysteriously, and Grady had not recovered since. The island seems to be a peaceful idyllic getaway, far from distractions of modern London life. However, Grady, who has slowly been descending into madness, seems to see his missing wife everywhere he goes. And mysterious messages appear, targeted just at him, the lone visitor on the island. Just what happened to his wife that fateful night?
From the acclaimed author of This Place is Still Beautiful comes an evocative, achingly romantic road trip story about grief, diasporic identities, and deep-buried secrets that haunt us, perfect for fans of Past Lives and The Farewell.
Stella Chen’s life ground to a halt when her brother unexpectedly passed away a year ago. Raised together by their grandmother in the Chinese countryside before rejoining their parents in the United States, his absence destroys the connective tissue in her family. With another jarring move her senior year, from rural Illinois to unfamiliar surroundings in San Diego, she is left alone and adrift in her family’s suffocating silence and the void of unanswered questions around her brother’s death.
So when Stella’s parents force her to join her estranged childhood friend Alan Zhao for a college tour all over California, Stella dreads it. Alan is a reminder of everything Stella wishes she could be — popular, gregarious, unburdened — and a reminder of how lost she is.
As this road trip takes Stella and Alan down beautiful coastlines and through fraught family dynamics, Stella can’t help but feel the spark of why she and Alan were once so close. Before long, they find themselves pulled into each other’s orbits, forcing unspoken feelings and long-hidden truths into the light.
Thank you to Books Forward for this copy. All quotes are subject to change.
I tell you that we are the only two people in the world who have lived the same lives. The same memories growing up. The same arc. We flew over the sea together, you and I. I think this must mean that even though you are gone, I carry the parts of you onward.
One thing I have come to enjoy about Xixi Tian’s writing is the way she interweaves the Chinese immigrant experiences into her characters’ lives. While it may not be everyone’s exact experiences, including my own, the heart of our people’s collective struggles is there and that is something I find truly powerful to see in an English novel where only a decade ago it would not have been a story easily shared for the masses.
All the Way Around the Sun features themes of grief and finding one’s way through life after momentous changes. Told from Stella’s perspective several months after her older brother had passed away in college, I thought the best part of this book was the slow unfolding of her and her brother Sam’s story. As children they had grown up in China with their grandmother while their parents had come to America to make money first so they could give their kids a better life before bringing them over. I know these are the experiences of some Chinese immigrants and I cannot imagine the depth of hardship it would be for the parents to sacrifice time with their children during momentous milestones in their youth, but also for the children to uproot their childhood into a foreign place with people that are family but also strangers.
Down the Rabbit Hole 