Saturday, November 16, 2013

The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty

5 Star

At the heart of The Husband’s Secret is a letter that’s not meant to be read.

My darling Cecilia, if you’re reading this, then I’ve died...

Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret—something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive. ...

Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all—she’s an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything, and not just for her: Rachel and Tess barely know Cecilia—or each other—but they too are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husband’s secret.


Lydia - 5 Star

The Husband’s Secret is a book you've probably heard a lot about by now, and I was surprised to find it lived up to the hype. Gripping, moving and a pure joy to read, The Husband’s Secret had everything I want in a book from a thought-provoking, unpredictable (mostly) plot, to complex characters with real issues and plenty of drama.

Cecelia, the epitome of a supermom, is conflicted when she reads a note from her husband that she was not intended to read until after his death. It is a last confession, only she finds it when he is still very much alive. All I kept thinking in the beginning was what would I do in Cecelia’s situation? And then when she reads the letter, all I could wonder was what I would do with the information inside.

Cecelia is not the only character that is struggling. Told from alternating viewpoints, we also watch Tess Curtis who has returned home to her mother’s house in Sydney after her husband dropped a bombshell on their marriage, and Rachel Crowley who is grief-stricken all over again when her son and daughter-in-law tell her they’re moving to America with her grandson, the only ray of light in her life since the death of her daughter decades ago. These women’s lives are already intertwined through the school Cecelia and Tess's children attend and Rachel works at, but the threads are about to get tied up even further in knots.

I flipped the pages of this book well into the night and picked it up again as soon as I had a spare second, desperate to find out what was going to happen, what had happened, and how it would all play out. Although I managed to super-sleuth some parts of the story, losing some of the unpredictability, the journey itself was still a pleasure to read. And I’m not sure John-Paul’s secret was really all that important anyway. What was important was what happened after, how his wife, Cecelia, dealt with it, and how the other two women’s lives also came to be impacted by the letter.

The writing in The Husband’s Secret is superb. This is a very easy read, but don’t let that fool you; there is plenty of stellar writing going on. From incredible dialogue to a fast paced plot and often deep and profound internal dialogue and prose, this novel kept me fascinated from the first sentence to the last. And it kept me thinking. There are so many secrets in this book. Everyone has one and while some are small, others are life-altering, and I kept wondering what I would do in each of the women’s situations. I could completely empathize with all three women in this story even though I’d never even remotely been in their shoes.

Pick up The Husband’s Secret today if you’re looking for a thought-provoking, compulsive, suspenseful read.


Thank you to me for buying this book. All opinions are my own. 

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1 comment:

  1. Wonderfully portrayed characters lives are interwoven in a complex but believable plot in which one person's deception has cruel consequences for many.

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