ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – On This Spot Fell One Tear of Love by Louise Doughty

Posted on 2nd September 2026 By Nicola

On This Spot Fell One Tear of Love by Louise Doughty is published by Phoenix and is available now. My thanks to the publishers for the review copy.

This is the only love story I am ever likely to write . . .

In her first memoir, acclaimed novelist Louise Doughty introduces us to her parents, Ken and Avis, and tells their story in reverse – beginning at the end of their lives and tracing them back over fifty years to uncover the secret origin of their love affair.

After her parents’ deaths, Louise and her siblings embark upon the extended process of clearing out the East Midlands bungalow where they had grown up. Just before its sale is completed, she stumbles upon a battered black suitcase containing a treasure trove of letters. She discovers how her parents had broken each other’s hearts and mended them, and how most of her views about them are wrong.

Honest and tender, heartbreaking and funny, this is a story about grief and loss and family, but most of all, it’s a story about love. Transporting us to the 1950s to meet two young, working-class people with a mountain to overcome but who are full of hope and spirit, it explores one of life’s great mysteries – the lives of our parents before we existed – and the joyful impossibility of unravelling the mysteries of the human heart.

The cover and title of On This Spot Fell One Tear of Love sold it to me in an instant but I felt that on reading the synopsis that this was a memoir I would love and I was right. So very right. This is an absolutely wonderful book.

Louise Doughty is a well-known author (Apple Tree Yard, Platform Seven etc.) but this is her first memoir and, as she herself admits, the only love story she will probably ever write. It tells of the lives of her parents, Ken and Avis, in reverse, beginning with the ways in which she loses them and then, after finding a suitcase of letters, right back to the beginning of their relationship. Doughty offers a very well-rounded portrayal of her parents. They had their flaws, as do we all, but it’s also very clear how much she and her siblings loved them and the huge roles their parents played in their lives.

This is my favourite kind of memoir, one about ordinary people living ordinary lives but with that splash of the unexpected. It’s not that what the author finds in the suitcase is earth-shattering; the revelation is that it reinvents them as people in their own right, not just mum or dad. The writing is beautiful, moving and at times, heartbreaking, but it’s also a love letter from daughter to parents and a love story between Ken and Avis that could never have been guessed at. What an absolutely superb book this is. I feel privileged to have read such a personal and evocative account. Thank you to the author for sharing what has become one of my favourite memoirs.

Louise Doughty’s novels include Platform Seven, recently filmed for ITV; Black Water, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; the bestseller Apple Tree Yard, which was adapted for BBC One; and Whatever You Love, nominated for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has been nominated for many other prizes including the Sunday Times Short Story Prize and the CWA Silver Dagger, along with creating and writing the hit BBC drama Crossfire. Her work has been translated into thirty languages. She lives in London.