Soulmate

I started reading a book about Ireland, because I bought a plane ticket to go to Ireland in June and I know nothing about that country, but the book was super depressing, so I switched to this one.

One thing I can say is that after 10 minutes of listening to this story, The Soulmate, by Sally Hepworth, I was hooked! The suspense was there from the start and didn’t let up until the end of the story, more than 8 hours later! It was hard to stop listening to it when I arrived at my destinations or needed to sleep!

This is the parallel story of two women, Amanda and Pippa, who are married to Max and Gabe. There are two narrators, although I couldn’t really catch the differences between their voices, but they both had a nice Australian accent. One day, one of the women falls off a cliff and dies. The two women tell the story from their points of view and go back and forth between the « present » and « before » the accident. At first, it was a bit irritating to always go back and forth in time and between the two stories, but I got used to it very quickly. Chapters are short, and the two stories become more and more intertwined and complex, until the two stories collide at the very end, with a surprising ending.

I really enjoyed listening to this story. I thought it was very well constructed, and the suspense was maintained throughout the whole book, but it was not « dreadful suspense » that would keep me wondering what catastrophe would come next. Good and bad secrets are revealed slowly, things go from great to OK to not so great, marriages are going up and down, people can be good and bad at the same time as we all are in real life, and I had not guessed the main secret, which is not surprising because I am usually clueless about these things. The only thing that annoyed me at times was the lack of self-esteem of these two women, and their lack of awareness of what was going on in their husbands’ lives. But that’s what made the story so good, I guess, otherwise we would have known everything from the beginning.