What if the fun of tracking down your exes brings up unwanted demons from the past?
On the morning of her mother's funeral, a letter lands on Suzy's doormat. She recognizes the handwriting at once. It's from Johnny, her first love. Enclosed is a CD, a compilation he has made from the time they were together in the 1980s. At once Suzy feels young again and longs to listen, but then the hearse arrives; now is not the time for nostalgia.
After the wake is over, Suzy is returning the teacups she has borrowed to the village hall in the pouring rain when—BAM!—she is knocked down by a car speeding down the country lane.
She wakes in hospital, confused and disorientated. Her son, Cameron, and her best friend, Debs, insist she was alone. Yet Suzy’s memory is different. She was with her friends, and there was freezing water all around them…
Has she been dreaming? Or having a flashback to a terrifying incident years ago?
To find the answers, Suzy must get in touch with her past. It’s a journey that involves tracking down several of her exes, facing her inner demons on the way.
What if the fun of tracking down your exes brings up unwanted demons from the past?
On the morning of her mother's funeral, a letter lands on Suzy's doormat. She recognizes the handwriting at once. It's from Johnny, her first love. Enclosed is a CD, a compilation he has made from the time they were together in the 1980s. At once Suzy feels young again and longs to listen, but then the hearse arrives; now is not the time for nostalgia.
After the wake is over, Suzy is returning the teacups she has borrowed to the village hall in the pouring rain when—BAM!—she is knocked down by a car speeding down the country lane.
She wakes in hospital, confused and disorientated. Her son, Cameron, and her best friend, Debs, insist she was alone. Yet Suzy’s memory is different. She was with her friends, and there was freezing water all around them…
Has she been dreaming? Or having a flashback to a terrifying incident years ago?
To find the answers, Suzy must get in touch with her past. It’s a journey that involves tracking down several of her exes, facing her inner demons on the way.
It lands on the doormat without fanfare.
Suzy is peering out of the kitchen window, checking for the hearse. She is aware of the squeak of the gate and the flap of the letterbox, but the postman is not her priority today and it’s Cameron, bounding down the stairs, two at a time, who picks up the letters from the hall.
‘There’s post,’ he says.
Absent-mindedly, Suzy takes it from him, thinking how weird it is to see her son in a suit, clean shaven and sandy curls dampened down in a vain attempt to look tidy. She is about to drop the letters onto the hall table when an envelope on the top of the pile catches her eye. I recognise that handwriting, she thinks, though where from she could not say.
Curious, she tears open the envelope. A clear plastic sleeve slips to the floor. She retrieves it, mystified. It’s a disc. One side gleams silver like a mirror, and when she turns it, a spectrum of colours shines back at her, radiating green, violet, cerise, orange. The other side is plain white, matt. On it is written:
For Suze.
There is a note, but she has no hope of reading it without her glasses. Spidery writing dances before her, maddeningly out of focus.
The car is not even late, she reminds herself. It’ll take less than five minutes to get the church, and the last thing I want is to be early, standing with the coffin near the altar, waiting for the congregation to arrive. Emotion rises in her throat. I mustn’t cry, she tells herself. Not yet, or I’ll smudge my make-up.
At last, there is the deep throb of an engine. Cam opens the front door.
‘Ready, Mum?’
Suzy smooths her skirt and checks around the cottage; teacups stacked high on the sideboard, the steel urn she has borrowed from the village hall filled with water, red light on so the water is hot for their return. Sandwiches covered in clingfilm, biscuits and fairy-cakes made by her elderly neighbour, Doreen.
Somehow, she manages to sit for the car journey, a crawl at best, then walk up the aisle of the church, past a sea of faces, eyes brimming with sympathy, to the pew at the front by the coffin, lid splayed with lilies, a safe choice, traditional, respectful, perfectly suited to Joan. Strange to think that all that remains of her mother, for so many decades such a formidable physical presence, is encased in this box of polished wood with brass handles. The force of her personality, an entire lifespan of memories and moods, the body that housed her, is before them, small and silent and hidden from sight. Then she, Joan, will be buried deep in the ground, alongside her husband, Ken. Gone.
‘Ah, there’s Alice,’ says Cam, and sliding his slender frame past Suzy to greet his girlfriend. She’s come from London specially. Sweet of her when she only met Cam’s grandmother a couple of times, and by then Joan had vanished into a world where she no longer recognised anyone or knew where she was.
The organist strikes up The Lord is My Shepherd and many in the congregation hesitate, wondering if they are meant to stand. It’s Doreen who rises and starts singing; belatedly others catch on, voices thin and reedy. It is only then Suzy realises she is still clutching the CD and note, knuckles white with tension. At least now she has time to rummage in her handbag and retrieve her glasses. She needs them anyway to read Songs of Praise.
Surreptitiously, she unfolds the piece of paper. And all at once Suzy knows why she recognised the handwriting. Her fingers tremble as she tries to hold the letter steady, yet the paper flaps like a moth beating against a lampshade.
Dear Suze, she reads. There’s only one person who ever called me that, she thinks. This can’t be from him.
‘I’ve just heard about your mum, and now seems a good opportunity to say I’m truly sorry, sorry about everything…’
It is from him. Johnny. Her first boyfriend, who she knew as a kid, who she learned to ride a bike with, played hide and seek with, grew up with. Johnny, who she fell in love with as a teenager, and who she loved so deeply, so passionately, it was as if he was part of her. Johnny, who she has not seen for what must be 25 years.
Suzy is fifty-five, divorced, and has a close relationship with her adult son. She is an artist who has put her creativity on hold for five long years to care for her mother as she declined deeply into dementia. Now her mother has died, placing Suzy at a crossroads in her life.
She receives a letter from her first boyfriend, Johnny. He has enclosed a CD copied from a long-lost mix tape he found, one he had made for her twenty-five years ago and had forgotten about.
Just seeing the list of songs he chose brings pieces of them to Suzy’s mind. Lyrics she has not thought about in years, along with sparks of memory:
She is ten and illicitly attending her first concert. She and Johnny are awestruck by David Bowie and the entire experience. “She has never been anywhere this thrilling, this hot and dark and crowded and noisy. For the first time she has a sense her own life doesn’t have to be constrained.”
Her memory moves forward. She is fourteen and seeing Johnny again; she is sixteen and they are a couple, evading her mother’s restrictions to be together. Johnny’s parents provide the warmth she is missing in the austere and sterile environment of her home.
Their relationship does not survive the distance after Suzy goes away to college. She moves on, with only a “Dear John” letter to say goodbye.
She goes on to have other relationships that are each passionate and exciting in their own ways. Now, years later, single for a long time, and freed from her obligations to her mother, she is finding herself again. Johnny’s letter and CD set a perfect tone as she tries to rediscover the magic of her youth.
This trip down memory lane means a lot of self-reflection and reconnecting with another ex-boyfriend. Eventually this deep-dive into the past unearths a long-buried experience of loss.
Rayner’s writing is conversational in style; the reader comes to feel like Suzy is someone we know. She beautifully conveys the memories of youthful joy and possibility that come back when hearing the songs we grew up with.
The only thing I would do differently is to leave the twist part out of the title. I would have preferred to read the book not knowing that something particularly unexpected was coming.
Fans of women’s fiction will appreciate this touching story of romance, nostalgia, friendship, healing, and parent-child connections.
I’d like to thank Reedsy Discovery, Sarah Rayner, and Creative Pumpkin Publishing for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.