My Lover's Lover - Softcover

O'Farrell, Maggie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747268177 ISBN 13: 9780747268178

Publisher: Headline Review, 2003

Synopsis

From the Costa Award winning Maggie O'Farrell comes the Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller MY LOVER'S LOVER, an intense, unnerving and passionate story of betrayal, loss and love, with all the frisson and psychological intensity of Rebecca.

When Lily moves into Marcus's flat and plunges headlong into a relationship, she must contend not merely with the disapproval of flatmate Aidan, but with a more intangible, hostile presence. Could it be that Sinead, Marcus's ex, is trying to communicate with her? When Lily begins to 'see' Sinead, first about the flat, and then on the streets of London, she must question not merely her sanity, but whether the man she loves is someone she can, or indeed ought, to live with at all.

About this title

Review

Maggie O'Farrell was heralded as a major new writer with her debut novel, After You'd Gone. And here she is with My Lover's Lover, demonstrating again her extraordinary talent. The coda to the novel's final part is Evelyn Waugh's "To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom". It's the choices and chances, the compromises and delusions, made in the search for love that preoccupy O'Farrell's central characters. The setting is 30-something London, New York, and rural China. Lily and Marcus meet at a gallery opening; almost the day after, they're sharing his chic loft, and soon after that, his bed. But if this sounds like chick-lit, any similarities end here. Narrated in four parts, O'Farrell moves adeptly from third to first person, from present to past to future.

Through Lily's account in the first section, a claustrophobic fear pulsates: she is haunted by Marcus's previous lover, Sinead, who seems to be everywhere--"The flat seems sticky with Sinead's fingerprints. [Lily] doesn't know what to do." But according to Marcus, Sinead "is no longer with us". On every page, O'Farrell's transcription of the body as register of the emotions, of fear and desire, is breathtaking. Language dissects and insinuates; revelations unfurl and double back. Sinead's incredulity at Marcus's being "not exactly faithful" and Marcus's old friend Aidan's consternation at his own secret longings are described with such tactility, such spare suggestiveness that these lovers' tales take on a brooding, yet haphazard quality. O'Farrell is an insightful and passionate chronicler of human emotions. It's compulsive and thrilling stuff. --Ruth Petrie

Review

A quietly dramatic dissection of the way past loves can haunt the present (The Daily Telegraph)

...an emotional whirlwind, all passionate yearnings, raw pain and messy truths; powerful in nailing the complications of love without missing it out the power of the emotions involved (The Scotsman)

This Rebecca-esque ghost story puts at its heart the gnawing insecurities that any act of intimacy soon invites (The Independent)

O'Farrell's writing has a crystalline precision of idiom - there isn't one image that fails to ignite recognition (Independent on Sunday)

O'Farrell has honourably equalled the success of her first novel, After You'd Gone, with a story that is certainly as absorbing - and just as beautifully written (Sunday Express)

About this edition

• Publisher: Headline Review
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0747268177
• ISBN 13: 9780747268178
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336