Published By: John Murray
Pages: 320
Released On: 04/03/2025
Everyone in the village said nothing good would come of Gabriel’s return. And as Beth looks at the man she loves on trial for murder, she can’t help think they were right.
She was seventeen when she’d first met Gabriel. Over that heady, intense summer, he made her think and feel and see differently. She thought it was the start of her great love story and that it would last forever. When Gabriel left to become the person his mother expected him to be, she was broken.
It was Frank who picked up the pieces. Together they’d built a home very different from the one she’d imagined with Gabriel. And there was a time – even years – when she was happy. Watching her husband and son riding a tractor across their farm, she remembered feeling so sure that, after everything, this was the life she was supposed to be leading.
But then Gabriel came back, and all Beth’s certainty about who she was and what she wanted crumbled. Even after ten years, their connection was instant. She knew it was wrong and she knew people could get hurt. But how could she resist a second chance at first love?
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and John Murray for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
It is thanks to Bex (@BexBookaholic on Twitter) that this book came to my attention. I was in a reading slump and just couldn’t focus on a book for very long and hoped this would bring me out of my slump.
And boy did it! I started it at about 8pm on Wednesday night, read until 11pm, picked it back up at about 8am on the Thursday and had finished it by 9am. I’ve said in previous reviews how much I love my bed and so it takes a good book to distract me from it. I usually have the intention to read in bed but I just end up falling asleep. But this one…it was like sleep had to remove it from my hands itself so reluctant I was to part with it.
We have multiple time periods with different characters (although always narrated by Beth), which I thought would be confusing but it really worked. We have the present day, the not-so-distant past, and their teenage years and it was just the best way to tell this story.
Our main character is Beth, and then we have her husband Frank, his brother Jimmy, and of course, her old love Gabriel. They are all so wonderfully created, with so much depth. None of them are heroes and none of them are villains, they all have light and dark in them which made for fantastic reading. You really are on everyone’s sides all at once. You want everything to work out between them, you want everyone to be happy and get the life they deserve.
It really whacks you right in the face almost instantly and I knew it was going to be a hard-going read emotionally; I could just see it was going to break my heart.
At its heart it is a love story – old love, new love, love for family, love for friends, parental love, lost love – but it has the excitement and rush of a thriller, which was an interesting thing to read, but really powerful.
It’s not the easiest of books to read. It’s complex and contains a lot of difficult themes, such as death and grief, fear, loss, love affairs, trust and dishonesty – it’s hard, but it makes the brighter parts of it shine even more, because without the dark we wouldn’t appreciate the light, and I think that is key in this book.
I sobbed at this so much, in so many places. It is such a perfect book I can’t even explain why. It’s heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measures. I am so grateful for the publisher to send me an e-copy of it, as there’s a real possibility I wouldn’t have read it otherwise, and that would have been a tragedy because the writing in this book is unlike any other.
Not only will it be on my “favourite books of 2025” list, it will definitely be going on my “favourite books of all time” list. It’s absolutely gorgeous. This is a book that I won’t be forgetting any time soon.
Books By Your Bedside 