FOLIO | BOOK REVIEW IF I NEVER MET YOU BY MHAIRI MCFARLANE

Fancy a bit of light relief from all the doom and gloom around us? Here is a fun, easy read with lots of humour and plot twists by the Sunday Times bestselling author, Mhairi McFarlane.

If I Never Met You is about Laurie whose partner, Dan dumps her after 18 years, just as she is hoping they will start a family. She is devastated by this turn of events, and to heap on more humiliation, they still have to work together in the same law firm. So when Laurie gets stuck in the lift with her good-looking colleague, Jamie, who is the office heartthrob, they hatch a plan to stage the perfect romance.

He’s looking for a promotion, but his bosses have indicated that he needs to settle down. Laurie wants revenge to make Dan jealous.

“Laurie had made them a great home and it still wasn’t enough. Or, she wasn’t. She felt so foolish: the whole time he’d been growing colder, quietly horrified, hemmed in and alienated by it. It was such a shallow thing, but Laurie felt so damn uncool for being satisfied by a life that Dan wasn’t.”

It’s a fauxmance rather than a romance, but things get complicated in this hilarious, touching and well-written tale which will have you turning the pages into the wee small hours.

“I think long-term relationships are the most potent demonstration of Sunk Cost Fallacy you’ll ever see,” Jamie said. “The definition of Sunk Cost Fallacy is a refusal to change something that makes you unhappy. You won’t, because look at the time and money and effort you’ll have wasted if you do. Which of course only means more waste.”

Had this been what Dan decided?’

If I Never Met You is Mhairi McFarlane’s sixth novel and she says she’d wanted to write the Fake Romance trope for ages: “The social media age is such a rich time to write the wholly performative love affair because there’s so much highlights-reel-showing-off going on already. To counterpoint the high concept romance, I wanted the pain that spurred the protagonist into doing it to feel very real: thus the awful separation and ‘emotional ghosting’ Laurie gets right on the cusp of starting a family and in sight of middle age.

And of course at the heart of it all is that romantic comedy mainstay: two people who imagine they’re chalk and cheese.”

Enjoy this classy rom com from a clever, witty writer.

By Letitia Fitzpatrick

FOLIO | BOOK REVIEW - WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING by Letitia Fitzpatrick

Where The Crawdads Sing is a bestselling debut novel by Delia Owens set in North Carolina in the Fifties and Sixties. It has sold more than 4.5 million copies and topped Amazon’s list of Most Sold Books in fiction in 2019. It’s also a favourite of book clubs everywhere.

It combines a murder mystery, a coming-of-age story and a celebration of the natural world. For years, rumours of the ‘Marsh Girl’ have swirled around Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. In 1969, when a handsome young local man, Chase Andrews, who’s a bit of a celebrity, is found dead, suspicion immediately falls on the Marsh Girl, Kya Clark.

Shy and rejected by the townsfolk, she’s a complex individual who has had to survive alone in the marsh she calls home, making friends among the wildlife, and learning an astonishing amount about nature. She’s extremely clever, becoming self-sufficient since she was a young child. As she grows up, navigating her lonely life, she yearns for love, and two young men from the town become fascinated by her.

“Learning to read was the most fun she’d ever had. But she couldn’t figure why Tate had offered to teach po’ white trash like her, why he’d come in the first place, bringing exquisite feathers. But she didn’t ask, afraid it might get him thinking on it, send him away.

“Now at last Kya could label all her precious specimens. She took each feather, insect, shell, or flower, looked up how to spell the name in Ma’s books, and wrote it carefully on her brown-paper-bag painting.

“‘What comes after twenty-nine?’ she asked Tate one day. He looked at her. She knew more about tides and snow geese, eagles and stars than most ever would, yet she couldn’t count to thirty. He didn’t want to shame her, so didn’t show surprise. She was awfully good at reading eyes."

However, Kya’s new life brings danger, and the gripping plot twists and turns. Kya is a compelling and sensitive character, and the author’s descriptive prose draws you into her life in the wild, evoking the beauty of the marshland and its inhabitants.

Where The Crawdads Sing draws on themes of survival, of racial and social division, and ecology. The heroine is portrayed sympathetically, and her story examines how isolation affects our behaviour and how abandonment and rejection cast long shadows on our lives.

It’s a real page-turner, right to the end.

FOLIO | BOOK REVIEW | SHUGGIE BAIN BY DOUGLAS STUART

Shuggie Bain is a powerful, beautiful first novel by Glasgow-born writer, Douglas Stuart. Winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, it’s set in working-class Glasgow in 1981, where poverty is casting a long shadow as traditional industries die.

Shuggie watches his beautiful mother, Agnes, often compared to the film star Elizabeth Taylor, struggle to hold on to her dreams, which include having her own front door.

Her violent, womanising husband abandons the family, and she and her three children end up in a dying mining town. Margaret Thatcher’s policies have led to mass unemployment, and alcohol and substance abuse are never far away.

Ground down by life, Agnes takes pride in her good looks, but becomes more dependent on booze to get through, as her older children pull away from her to try to save themselves. Her youngest, Shuggie, a lonely sweet boy, adores his mother, clutching on to the hope of a brighter future for them, but he has to cope with his own struggles. He is bullied for being effeminate, different and not fitting into this brutal world where men dominate. Agnes wants to stand by him, but her addiction means that most of the family’s meagre benefits go on drink, and she gets lost in a haze of alcohol a lot of the time, leaving her vulnerable son to face the world on his own.

As her alcoholism becomes worse, Agnes is exploited by men and even by neighbours pretending to be friends. Her eldest child, Catherine is the first to get away, escaping to South Africa, then Shuggie’s older brother leaves, telling his brother that Agnes will never change.

Both are afraid of getting sucked into a hopeless, desperate situation. Shuggie’s deep bond with his mother is heartbreaking, as her decline continues. They are left alone together and things go from bad to worse, but young Shuggie has a huge capacity for love and forgiveness.

“She was no use at maths homework, and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her, but Shuggie looked at her now and understood this was where she excelled. Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise.”

Shuggie Bain is a brilliant, tragic insight into a family beset by secrets, alcoholism, and sexuality against a backdrop of poverty. The author shows huge compassion in this unforgettable novel.

FOLIO | BOOK REVIEW 'GROWN UPS' BY MARIAN KEYES

Grown Ups is a lively, fast-paced and moving story about a highly dysfunctional (although hilarious at times) Irish family, The Caseys, and all of their complex, entangled stories.

The three Casey brothers, their wives and assorted children all spend a lot of time together, but tensions are simmering under the surface from old resentments, second marriages, truculent teenagers, step-siblings and fears of insufficiency.  

Throughout the book the Casey clan delivers an endless amount of drama peppered by author Marian Keyes’s signature humour, while simultaneously addressing serious, real-life issues such as bulimia, anxiety, depression and alcoholism.

With the countless characters and their many complex relationships, the book can seem a little confusing at the beginning for some; but stick the pace because it all falls into place and, once finished, most are sad to see the complicated clan go. It’s a bit like arriving into a dinner party and immediately forgetting everyone’s names once you’ve been introduced, but as the stories unfold and the night passes, you put it all together.  Personally I didn’t need it, but the family tree at the beginning of the book ought to have helped some!

Keyes brilliantly captures the impossible paradox of being a 21st-century grown-up, furiously trying to keep up, pretending you know what you’re doing, never feeling like you’re enough, parenting children who seem more savvy than you, and sometimes just wishing someone else would sort it all out for you. Told from multiple points of view, Keyes knows best how to bring out her character insecurities and flaws, making them incredibly relatable – and perhaps this is why the book is such a hit.

Overall I found the book witty and engaging in a light-hearted and typically Marian Keyes way - it’s difficult not to become so immersed in the lives of these people that the pages just fly by – but it’s also a page turner for the more serious and powerful themes around the dynamics of family, marriage and body image. There really isn’t a dull moment, and this is tragicomedy at its heartbreaking and witty best…