Review: WHAT SHE NEVER TOLD ME, Kate McQuaile

• source: Review copy from Hachette Australia at NetGalley
• first published in Great Britain in 2016, publication date March 8, 2016
• pre-order available from Amazon

Synopsis (Publisher)

What do you do when you find out that your whole life could be a lie?

I talked to my mother the night she died, losing myself in memories of when we were happiest together. But I held one memory back, and it surfaces now, unbidden. I see a green postbox and a small hand stretching up to its oblong mouth. I am never sure whether that hand is mine. But if not mine, whose?

Louise Redmond left Ireland for London before she was twenty. Now, more than two decades later, her heart already breaking from a failing marriage, she is summoned home. Her mother is on her deathbed, and it is Louise's last chance to learn the whereabouts of a father she never knew.

Stubborn to the end, Marjorie refuses to fill in the piecesof her daughter's fragmented past. Then Louise unexpectedly finds a lead. A man called David Prescott . . . but is he really the father she's been trying to find? And who is the mysterious little girl who appears so often in her dreams? As each new piece of the puzzle leads to another question, Louise begins to suspect that the memories she most treasures could be a delicate web of lies.

My Take

I know the year is only a month old, and I've only read 15 books so far, but this really is the best I've read so far, and it will be hard to beat. You know what happens when a book grabs you, and you seize every opportunity to read a few more pages?

Written in the first person, this novel gets you in right from the first word. There are little puzzles for the reader to solve as we try to fill in the story of Louise's life. At her mother's funeral she meets an uncle whom she can't remember ever meeting before. He has some photographs he would like to give her and she promises to visit him. But the solicitor who holds the will can't answer the most desperate question Louise has: how to find her father. She knows his name but nothing else.

A great read, with lots of twists and turns, believable characters and scenarios.

My rating: 4.9

About the author
Kate McQuaile is a graduate of the Faber novel-writing course. She lives in London and works as a journalist, but is originally from Drogheda in Ireland.