"Exploring midlife shifts and female friendship through a duo of lifelong friends, this character-driven novel is a subtly powerful literary treasure."
Profoundly perceptive as it shares the stories of two women whose lives have been connected since childhood, Kathleen MacMahon’s Other People's Lives is literary fiction at its most resonantly absorbing. Richly detailed, and written in an engagingly lucid style, it presents tender, nuanced portraits of Justine and Iseult, who’ve been best friends since childhood.
Now approaching fifty, Justine, “a born worrier”, has been married to Iseult's brother for twenty-five years and still lives in her childhood home. While Iseult has lived abroad for much of her adult life, their friendship holds firm. They remain “like two balls of wool knitted together row by row into a jumper, and if there were a few dropped stitches along the way there was no going back to fix them now”.
When Justine’s daughter announces her engagement, and Justine fears she’s making a mistake, she begins to question her own marriage and life choices, and then comes a quiet crisis as she feels the weight of accumulated compromises: “Her entire life sometimes seemed no more than an endless cycle of picking up people’s clothes and washing them and hanging them out to dry, then gathering them in and folding them and putting them in wardrobes, only for them to appear again on the floor of their bedrooms”.
Brilliantly observed and quietly potent as it unpacks themes of midlife realisations, and how the choices we make in a moment can have lifelong impact, Other People’s Lives comes recommended for readers who love richly-layered stories centred on marriage, midlife experiences, and female friendship, including fans of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.
'Marriage was the biggest decision of their lives and yet they made it so lightly it was barely a decision at all'
| Primary Genre | Literary Fiction |
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'Marriage was the biggest decision of their lives and yet they made it so lightly it was barely a decision at all'As schoolgirls, Justine and her best friend Iseult dreamed of a future that revolved around marriage. They saw it as a happy ending, never imagining for a moment that the reality would be more complicated.Coming up to fifty, they're still best friends.
Other People's Lives features in the following genres: Literary Pick of the Month, Family Drama, Literary Fiction, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Street fiction / urban fiction, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Narrative theme: Interior life, Contemporary lifestyle fiction
Paperback, Hardback. £17.09, down from the £18.99 cover price. In Stock.
Other People's Lives was written by Kathleen MacMahon and published by Sandycove an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd
Other People's Lives has 320 pages
£17.09, reduced from £18.99. In Stock.
