Published By: Fig Tree
Pages: 352
Released On: 04/06/2026
I had tried to be a good person and live a nice, normal life. It wasn’t working out. Why was I such a no-but-er? I would be a yes-ander!… And after that moment, I didn’t give another little f*ck what I did.
Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her neighbour’s anarcho-Marxist roofer, is a crisis. Life seems to put every possible obstacle in their way: she’s pregnant, he has a girlfriend, he’s fifteen years younger, she’s terrified of messing up her children and equally drawn towards this magnetic man who entrusts her with his deepest secret.
Now it’s three years later and Nando has been murdered.
As her bewildered husband tries to make sense of the wildly unpredictable person his wife has become, Perdita has other things on her mind. For starters, who is the mysterious woman sitting outside her house in a parked car all day? How can she stop her adored baby brother from being pulled under by his opioid addiction? Can someone with a childhood like hers ever be the mother her children deserve?
And most of all, what should she do with the searing memories of the affair which turned her life upside down?
*****
Thanks to Fig Tree for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I will start this review by saying I have no idea what I’m going to write. It’s one of those books that made me feel (negatively, in this case) but I can’t quite explain why, so bear with me.
I am so confused by this book. I’d nothing but praise for it and was really excited for it.
From the synopsis, it sounded like some thriller-cum-crime novel. But I didn’t get that. Yes there’s a murder but for me, that’s where it stopped.
It’s a mishmash, there’s a touch of crime, and there’s romance, and there’s literary fiction and contemporary fiction, and just a lot of chatter and not a lot of happenings. I wasn’t settled on what it was trying to be, it felt lost, like it was trying to be something it wasn’t.
What didn’t help was that the main couple, Perdita and Theo, are so unsufferable and I had no empathy for them and so didn’t really care about them.
It does get a bonus star for originality. I read hundreds of books a year an so it can be hard to stan out, but this did at least feel quite fresh.
The pacing is odd. Nothing happens and it’s so slow, but then you find you’re half way through. Some chapters felt pointless and like they were there to meet a word count. It flits between the present and an unspecified time in the past, which I did like as I like dual timelines.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good premise and an interesting idea, and I think it is a stable debut, but I felt so flat whilst reading it. I didn’t get any of the excitement I was expecting.
It’s just very messy and unsure of what it is, what it wants to be, what it’s trying to say, and I am just really quite disappointed.
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