Between You and Me by Lisa Hall

5 Stars from me!

Such a clever book!

I will confess to discovering and reading this book purely because of the author’s name… but I’m so glad I did! I sat down with it one Friday bank holiday morning and I read and read and read and read. Several cups of tea and two coffees later I had read the whole darn thing!

Between You and Me tells you a story from two different perspectives, I found I very quickly had a ‘favourite’ out of these two and read the other person’s versions almost dismissively! Because the two different view points are both written in the first person I will admit that I found the first couple of chapters almost difficult to read. Not because of the story or because of the quality of writing, as they were both marvellous, it was more a case of my brain needing to re-train itself to read a certain way; which it did very quickly.

Later on in the book the reason for this is abundantly clear. The author will be gratified to know that I got to a certain point and then found myself thinking ‘oh god there are typos in here, she’s made a mistake’ and then page backwards through the story to see where it had gone wrong.

Of course, it hadn’t gone wrong and that is the beauty of this book. The subtle tricks that are played are quite brilliant; the glass of wine with the neighbour I think was probably the clincher for me, leading me cleverly down the wrong path.

As ever with this type of storyline, I do wonder how many people contact the author to discuss their own situation or to thank her for highlighting the issue. It is very sad that people live in such situations. If you are one of those people, here are some organisations that can help:

http://www.nationaldomesticviolencehelpline.org.uk/

http://www.refuge.org.uk/what-we-do/our-services/helpline/

https://www.gov.uk/report-domestic-abuse

http://www.mensadviceline.org.uk/

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Synopsis: They say every marriage has its secrets. 

But no one sees what happens behind closed doors. 

And sometimes those doors should never be opened… 

Sal and Charlie are married. They love each other. But they aren’t happy. Sal cannot leave, no matter what Charlie does – no matter how much it hurts.