Review: The Love of My Life by Rosie Walsh

 I was sent this audiobook in exchange for an honest review. 

I have held you every night for ten years and I didn’t even know your name. We have a child together. A dog, a house.

Who are you?

Emma loves her husband Leo and their young daughter Ruby: she’d do anything for them. But almost everything she's told them about herself is a lie.

And she might just have got away with it, if it weren’t for her husband’s job. Leo is an obituary writer and Emma is a well-known marine biologist, so, when she suffers a serious illness, Leo copes by doing what he knows best – reading and writing about her life. But as he starts to unravel her past, he discovers the woman he loves doesn’t really exist. Even her name is fictitious.

When the very darkest moments of Emma’s past life finally emerge, she must somehow prove to Leo that she really is the woman he always thought she was . . .

But first, she must tell him about the love of her other life.

Review: Wow this book had me hooked in from the word go and I could not stop thinking about it as I was listening! Sometimes you have mega high expectations for a book or an author and those expectations are not met, you hype it up too much for yourself and you’ve only yourself to blame. I had high expectations going into this since Rosie Walsh is one of my favourite authors of all time and those expectations were not only met but exceeded. This is, without a doubt, one of my all time favourite books of the year!

I loved getting to meet Emma and Leo and even though this book is about Emma and who she actually is, we get to discover an equal amount about both characters. If you love a character driven novel then you will love this one. Emma is so complex, we know she has a hidden past and we know that we may discover some things about her we might not like but you find yourself really getting behind her and empathising with her all the way. At the same time we have Leo who is suddenly prying into his wife’s past and going through her things, we should hate this invasion of privacy and this breaking of trust and yet you find yourself totally backing him and his decisions too because he is helping us as readers find out about who Emma is too-such a surprise!

But it is the writing and the crafting of this book that really blew me away. This is a book that leaves you with more questions than answers at the end of every chapter. You jump around in time and you jump around between Leo and Emma’s story and so you’re always waiting and wanting to find out more. To drip feed information so painfully slowly to your reader is such an awesome skill and one that I am in total awe of. I listened to the audiobook and it was great aside from the way the narrator pronounced the station Leuchars which unfortunately Emma goes to quite a bit in this novel. It bothered me but it definitely didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the writing. 

This was the kind of audiobook that I stayed longer in my car to keep listening to, that I had to keep playing once I arrived somewhere just to see the fall out from a revelation that just happened. I loved every minute of it and although it wasn’t always a pain-free read in terms of the content, it was all worth it. I just loved the intricacies of these two characters and I adored the way this book was crafted and the story woven oh so carefully. I highly recommend it!

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