ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Births, Deaths and Marriages by Laura Barnett

Births, Deaths and Marriages by Laura Barnett is published by Doubleday and is available now. My thanks to the publishers for the proof copy.

Zoe, Al, Rachel, Rob, Yas and Indie. Six friends who were inseparable at university, who have all had their secret or not so secret passions for each other, their hopes and fears.

Over the years, they have gone their separate ways. Rob is a history teacher, with a string of broken relationships behind him. Yas is a surgeon and very much her own woman. Indie is married and a successful coffee entrepreneur. Rachel is a stay at home mum with two children. Al, widowed young, is about to take over his father’s funeral business.

When Rob’s engagement party throws the gang together once more, some passions are reignited, old connections and resentments resurface. Over the next twelve months, there will, among the friends, be a birth, a marriage, and a death – but whose?

BIRTHS, DEATHS AND MARRIAGES is an era-spanning, globe-trotting novel about love, friendship, and how to stay at least relatively sane in an ever crazier world. It’s about a group of friends growing older, the possibility of second chances, about kindness and joy. It’s about births, deaths, marriages… and everything in between.

If a character-driven story set over an intense year sounds like your kind of story then I recommend Births, Deaths and Marriages by Laura Barnett. It tells of six friends who met at university and have stayed friends ever since, through the many trials and tribulations that adult life can bring. By the end of the year there will have been one birth, one death and one marriage but who each of these life events will affect can only be ascertained by the reader following their trajectories throughout the year in question.

I liked all the characters and their intermingled lives (some of them are not just friends, or have been more to each other in the past) and the fact that despite all that they have been through they’ve remained friends for twenty years. I particularly liked midwife Zoe and undertaker Al, but this is one of those rare books where every character is pretty likeable. I think the author did a great job with them all.

This novel felt realistic with lives that are messy and joyful and often hard to cope with. I enjoyed being along for the journey.

Laura Barnett is the author of four novels including thenumber one bestseller, The Versions of Us, Greatest Hits, Gifts and This Beating Heart. As an arts journalist and theatre critic, she has written regularly for the Guardian, Observer, the Daily Telegraph and Time Out London. Laura lives with her husband Andy, son Caleb and cat Eno in rural Kent.