A review by sarahmatthews
My Lover's Lover by Maggie O'Farrell

mysterious tense medium-paced

My Lover’s Lover by Maggie O’Farrell

Read partly in Braille and partly on audio

Headline Books

Pub. 2002, 288pp

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I’ve loved Maggie O’Farrell’s writing for years, since her debut After You’d Gone had me in tears while waiting for a train at Paddington station back in 2000! I thought I’d read all her books but when I looked through her backlist recently, looking for a holiday read, I found a couple I’d missed. This is her second book and, honestly, it’s not one of her best but her characters are always brilliantly drawn and interesting enough to keep me reading, plus the mystery element of this book was intriguing.

The set up here is that Lily moves in with a man she meets at a party who has a spare room and they start a rather doomed relationship. I found it hard to really understand how she fell for him as he seemed self centred from the start and there were plenty of red flags and I wasn’t convinced they liked each other much, they never seem to have fun together. But I guess there’s a 10 year age gap and she was young and inexperienced and was caught up in the glamour of his career as a respected archetect; a power imbalance she didn’t want to confront. But the main point of the story is the haunting by the ex-lover that drives her to the edge and this was told pretty well on the whole. I enjoy a psychological thriller and this did keep me guessing and mentally shouting at Lily “don’t do  that, get out of that flat now!” Etc., which is part of the fun.

The second half of the novel changed mood completely but I really wanted to know the end by then so I switched to audio to finish it quicker and I’m glad I did as I found a lot to enjoy about it. Maggie O’Farrell does the time and perspective switches much better in some of her later books and it’s fascinating to see how she was figuring some of this out while writing this one. 

I was left a little unsatisfied by it on the whole and a bit perplexed as it could have gone in so many directions but just didn’t take the extremes in the end which many commercial fiction books do, and, you know what? I really liked that about it. I’m pretty sure the confusion I felt as a reader was intentional. A book about obsession, jealousy, being young and the weight of life’s pressures.