My Lover's Lover

Rating:
Summary: Not as good as After You'd Gone..
Review: I loved the book After You'd Gone by the same author. I had high hopes for this one, but it didn't meet that expectation.

I enjoyed O'Farrell's journey through Lily's mind and how she felt in her relationship with Marcus. Her obsession with Sinead was also interesting but none of the characters felt real to me. Lily's leap into a love affair with a man she knows nothing about just seemed a little strange and his avoidance of every question regarding his previous relationship only compounded the evidence of the fact that he was and still is deceptive.

While wondering about a significant other's past relationships is natural, I think that Lily took her curiosity to the extreme at times, even tricking her subconscious into believing things that were not true.

A good piece of fiction, but I would recommend her other novel before this one.

Rating:
Summary: A finely crafted psychological thriller!
Review: My Lover's Lover is one engrossing erotic thriller! It enthralled me from beginning to end as it told the story of Lily and Marcus's bizarre love affair. Things start out promising between the couple. When Lily occupies the bedroom that was once Sinead's, Marcus's ex-girlfriend, strange things begin to happen. Lily is led to believe that Sinead is gone. However, her presence is palpable. There are some disarming twists as Sinead resurfaces...

This novel's writing is deceptively simple. The suspense and darkness are subtle, albeit tangible. The building of tension is finely crafted. I disagree with most of the reviewers here. This is a fine piece of psychological thriller. Maggie O'Farrell is a talented British author and I look forward to reading her other books. Highly recommended...

Rating:
Summary: Slightly disappointing
Review: The novel starts as a gothic romance and ends somewhere completely different. Like some reviewers before, I found 'My Lover's Lover' a disappointment after reading 'After You'd Gone'.

The book begins as homage to DuMaurier's 'Rebecca' - which is a far superior novel by all accounts - though O'Farrell makes some acknowledgement to this by having Hitchcock's film playing in the background. The novel then changes pace and moves away from its more accomplished counterpart. I like this method of O'Farrell's; she demonstrated it in her previous novel, but it doesn't work as well here. Similarly, O'Farrell's use of metaphor and simile in this novel appear forced at times, in contrast to the ease of language from her first work.

Some other reviewers commented that she lacked the characterisation required in order to make it a more interesting novel - she did. I did not find any of the characters likeable and found myself unable to care what happened to them. It is as though mid-way through writing it, O'Farrell decided she, herself, did not like her protagonist and wanted to concentrate on another. I did see what O'Farrell had attempted to do with the haunting of the previous girlfriend, but thought she was capable of executing this in a far better way.

Nevertheless, 'My Lover's Lover' is a worthy read and, perhaps, if I had not read 'After You'd Gone' beforehand, I would not be so critical of it.