Not happy ever after. The marriage of two young teachers in London starts with romance but swiftly descends into frenzy.
The prologue is a first person narrated back story which summarily explains that the narrating protagonist is a young French woman living in England and studying education at Cambridge. Chapter 1 begins the narrative proper. It is written in a diary style, although each entry is a summary of the events of a week, or a month.
Chapter 2 heralds a sudden change. It starts with Edward masturbating to online porn and continues with email evidence of his relationship with a student. The narrator responds with shock and horror and fractured sentences, a sort of stream of consciousness style.
As the story continues, it becomes clear that Edward has mental health problems, perhaps suffering from bipolar syndrome. The narrator seems to live on the edge of hysterical melodrama and their relationship veers from wild sex to fury. She is enormously self-centred and shows almost no empathy ("The man was so inconvenient with his poor diabetes management. I felt so many times like his nurse, rather than his wife"; Ch 9). I found it difficult to believe she could be a mother to two very young children (whose care seems delegated to au pairs) and a senior teacher.
Sometimes the story is detailed and at other times it proceeds at a breakneck speed. For example, the narrator's first pregnancy lasts for a few pages and Edward's year teaching in Hackney gets three paragraphs. I found it difficult to keep track of a large cast of characters and I was also confused by some of the details of the plot. For one brief moment Edward seems to suffer from diabetes ("Edward’s hypos in the middle of the night. Why does he always have to go hypoglycaemic when I really want to sleep, or when it is really late and there is no sugar in the kitchen"; Ch 9) but this does not seem to be mentioned outside this chapter. The events of the prologue also seem unrelated to the rest of the book. The moments of narrative incoherence gave a sort of verisimilitude; there was a feeling that this must be a true story because real-life can be chaotic.
Whether it is autobiographical or not, it is told with enormous energy and passion. It ends on an amazing cliff-hanger. While my own novels feature unresolved endings (such is life), the fact that the sequel is immediately advertised makes me think that this is might be a novel which has been chopped into two novellas.
If you enjoy reading about a stormy relationship in which all emotions are perpetually at boiling point, this is the book for you.
Selected quotes:
- "We make love like there is no tomorrow, every night."
- "I’m a control freak! I am always in the power position; well not anymore."
- "one of those mum-to-be magazines, which said that the father determined the sex of the baby, but the mother passed on the intelligence."
November 2025
Published in 2021; I read the Amazon kindle edition
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