This is a book of three parts and they all hit me in different ways.

We start with Eadie’s 1970s childhood, though her family were very different to mine and the location different too this was all super familiar territory to me and I loved reading it. Despite the fact that it’s not all roses for her I enjoyed the story of Eadie and her friends making it out of primary school and on to secondary school and the changing connections between them as they went.

Then in the middle part of the book we move on to Manchester University in the late 1980s and what had been gloriously nostalgic suddenly came a bit too close to home and brought up a load of memories for me. Eadie was a few years ahead of me but her Manchester landscape intersected with mine (I was a masters student there). This is the point where you move from having your life steered for you to driving it yourself and though my mistakes were different to Eadie’s and a lot of time has now passed since then I found this section of the book really hit a raw nerve for me.

The final section of the book is where the ‘unfinished business’ comes in, and we’re now into the present of the book. I’ve forgotten the exact time frame (and the book has gone back to the library now so I can’t check) but it’s about 2000.

One device that annoyed me: Eadie’s narrating the book whilst looking backwards in time and she’s concealing information from the reader in a way that felt rather unnecessary. You find yourself guessing who she’s referring to. I found the third part of the book better because after the mystery is stripped away the framing story stops feeling like the wrapper for a bad thriller and gets back to being a good read. I’d say that the book is a departure for North because most of her other books are girl meets boy romances and this, though it’s got a romance within it, doesn’t hinge on it in a way that the other books do. I’ve always liked how North’s books have themes to them beyond romance some of them seemingly quite unlikely, this one tells you a lot about garden cities and clubbing among other things. But I liked that this was less of a romance than usual, I enjoyed the book and it made me think, not just about the story within but about my own life, and though that can hurt sometimes it’s good to have the opportunity to do that.