Once, Again, Always

LoveReading Says

Imagine waking up to learn that you’re married to the big-head who made your life a misery through school. That’s the alarming situation 27-year-old Molly is forced to face in Amanda Gayle’s Once, Again, Always debut. 

After coming round in hospital feeling hazy, as if “she was nothing more than candle wax dripped between bedsheets”, Molly is flipped into the real world when Aster Bishop, with his “wide, icy blue eyes”, forces his way into her room yelling, “She’s my fucking wife!” Turns out Molly is missing chunks of her memory, which leaves her reeling with colossal questions: what the hell happened in the six years she’s lost to amnesia? And how the hell did she wind up falling for “awful, arrogant” Aster Bishop, the boy who’d been her boarding school rival. 

The seeds of a slow-burn story of suspense and longing are sown while Molly is still in hospital, when she observes how “Aster Bishop embodied an uncanny valley in a way Molly hadn’t known was possible…There was no denying that Bishop had grown into his features... Less sharp, more refined.

She’d caught glimpses of the beginnings of this in college but had tried not to waste her attention on anything Bishop was getting up to, dubiously evolving handsomeness or otherwise”. After Molly’s friends convince her to return to the home she and Aster (allegedly!) share, with “Before” chapters providing background on the couple’s past, there’s palpable chemistry between them, even with Aster relegated to sleeping on the sofa.

While Molly is surprised to find herself falling for him (again?), she can’t shirk a feeling that he’s harbouring secrets.

Brimming with longing, Once, Again, Always comes recommended for readers who love breezy romantic fiction driven by slow-burn, will-they-won’t-they tension, with its memory-loss element bringing questions around identity to the entertaining party.

Reviewed by Joanne Owen
Joanne Owen’s lifelong love of reading and writing began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, and very much wished that witches (and Mrs Pepperpot) were real.
More reviews by Joanne Owen

About Once, Again, Always

A second-chance romance following a young woman who wakes up in the hospital with no memory of the past six years, only to find that she apparently married the one man she can't stand-her arrogant and infuriating former boarding school rival.

Read the full description

Find This Book In