This has been my ‘in the bath’ book for the last three or four days and I don’t mind saying that I have been like a prune during that time because I kept reading ‘just another chapter’. I also drove my other half crazy by topping up the hot water every time I gave in to the story. I have to follow an unusual reading regime in my house. It was built in 1787 and has a lot of ‘quirks’, including the emptying of my entire tub of bath water into the kitchen below instead of the usual plumbed in route. A further quirk is that if I take my iPad into the bathroom to read from Kindle or NetGalley, it simply switches itself off. I can sometimes bypass this by putting the iPad into airplane mode before going into the bathroom, but it’s not a fail-safe method. So I tend to read real proof copies in the bath and downstairs, keeping my iPad for bed where I don’t want to wake my other half. I don’t like to put on a reading light or do what my sister-in-law does and go to bed in my brother’s night fishing hat with built in head-lamp. She didn’t like to keep him awake by reading with a light on in their camper van.
So now you know that we’re all a bit odd in my family, I’ll come back to the book, one that grabbed me straight away and kept hold of me till the final page. There’s just something compulsive about it. It could be the short chapters that are so snappy and often end on a cliffhanger. It could be the alternating narration between neighbours Natalie and Rani who live across from each other. The women have such strong narrative voices and are both in completely relatable positions in life; Natalie is the beautiful neighbour with the killer job and the lovely house across the road that Rani has been coveting since she moved here. In fact as soon as the For Sale sign went up she was over there with a different name and address, swanky clothes and great back story in order to view it. So when Natalie moves in Rani knows exactly which high end work tops she butters her toast at in the morning and the surprisingly sheltered garden made for children to play in. We all think the grass is greener at times, but few of us would go to the lengths that Rani will.
Natalie does appear to have everything going for her. She’s undeniably beautiful with honey blonde hair and designer clothing. Naturally she’s the high flyer in a corporate law firm, with the opportunity to become the youngest ever woman at her firm to become partner. Her handsome and older husband Charlie is attentive and thoughtful. The pair married in Tuscany and Charlie is keen to start a family, hence the beautiful home in just the right area. Sometimes, when people really love a house they’ve looked at, they might claim to feel immediately at home there or be able to see them living in these perfectly curated spaces but for Natalie it’s less of a feeling and more of a certainty. She has lived here before, right at the beginning of her life, before her dad left and when she had an imaginary friend, Noemi, to run around with. She knows she was running a risk not telling Charles, but when the elderly next door neighbour doesn’t seem to recognise her she seems to have a got away with it. What is luring her back there? Her mother Luella is unlikely to enjoy a trip down memory lane, in fact she’s the first to remind Natalie how her dad left them in a terrible state, financially as well as emotionally. She likes to remind Natalie what a good man Charles is: all Charles wants is to settle and have a family; to look after Natalie; to take the burden of her high-powered career away; help her cultivate the right sort of friends. Surely that can’t be bad?
Rani lives opposite in her cramped flat, being a full-time mum and wearing supermarket clothes. She watches Natalie settle in and we can see a perfect psychological storm starting to build. Rani will happily admit that, at times, Natalie’s lifestyle must be hard to keep up. Although that revelation only surfaces when she realises it does take work to be that put together and professional. At first though, Rani feels almost as if Natalie is a fantastical creature who simply drifts out of bed with not a hair out of place, naturally smelling of roses and never working for her enviable figure. Rani feels out of place next to her, in her daily mum uniform of leggings and a t-shirt. However, these thoughts come from Rani’s anxieties and feelings of inadequacy. Although she loves her beautiful girls, she does miss going to out to work and having something that is entirely hers. She also feels disconnected from Joel, although she loves him the years of babies and toddlers have wiped out any spontaneity or time for themselves. When Joel commits a huge betrayal Rani has a huge choice to make. Can they find a way back to each other?
Just like Rani, we are drawn in more and more by Natalie’s life. Cleverly the author has made sure that we get to see more than Rani, through Natalie’s chapters we get her inner thoughts while everyone else is still seeing the perfect exterior. We know that she’s having nightmares again, full of people close to her but who don’t look quite right. Noemi is back too, breaking into her thoughts and becoming so tantalisingly real. As the two women become friends, I was actually a little bit scared for Rani. She doesn’t know what she’s getting into, although she has an inkling the perfect marriage to Charles may not be all it seems. I was unsure where the danger was coming from, was Charles much more dangerous than he at first appears or is Natalie’s strange past all in her imagination? Why did she choose to live in this house, when her childhood seems like an endless nightmare and Luella comes across as a harsh and controlled woman? It’s as if she adopted the Royal family’s motto for her family; ‘never complain, never explain’. Rani is the first true friend Natalie has had in her adult life, so she’s not always as open as she could be or is so used to thinking what Luella’s take on the situation might be, she comes out with something that sounds wrong. As Natalie starts to enjoy a little freedom, what will Charles’s reaction be and what dangers might the two women face if they start to dig up her past? This book is so well paced and the tension just keeps building. I enjoyed the female characters in the book and the unflinching depiction of domestic abuse that forms part of the story. I found Rani a more engaging and rounded character than Natalie, but of course she would be – none of her past is missing. Natalie comes across as a borderline personality, she has no sense of her own identity and has always gone along with the strongest person in the room, adopting their values and attitudes as her own. Rani has a lot more to lose, not material possessions but a family and roots that she knows keep her grounded. It’s knowing the threat and knowing how much Rani has to lose that kept me reading, even if the bath water was getting a little cold.
Meet the Author
Mira V Shah is a writer, former City lawyer turned legal editor and the proud owner of three good dogs. She is the daughter of Indian African parents and lives in North London with her husband and the pack – merely a few miles from where she grew up, although she often dreams about retiring in Italy should her intermittent lottery entries prove successful.
She wrote her first ever novel in 2020 during the first UK lockdown after studying on the Curtis Brown Creative novel writing course. HER was published by Hodder and Stoughton in November 2023.
The Lotus Readers 