Sherry Thomas is an extraordinarily talented author. Her prose is letter perfect, and her study of a fractured relationship is second to none. She is a master of the slow-reveal, feeding the reader the pieces of the puzzle with a brilliant sense of timing, steadily drawing the reader in, engaging their emotions exquisitely and placing them firmly and personally within the hidden, private depths of a broken marriage.

In Not Quite a Husband, Sherry will lead you to question your notions of right and wrong, and show you that sometimes there is no clear answer or even purpose to assigning blame.

How do you move forward, when, having long believed yourself the victim, you discover that the failure of your marriage could more accurately be placed upon your shoulders? That you can no longer claim the high ground? When your behaviours prove more abhorrent than that one misdeed of his? When you finally, finally realise what you never knew you had and were too blind to see?

She had a sudden vision of herself as a wizened old physician, her hands too arthritic to wield a scalpel, her eyes too rheumy to diagnose anything except measles and chicken pox. The wizened old physician would very much like to drink tea next to her wizened old professor, chuckle over the passionate follies of their distant youth, and then go for a walk along the river Cam, holding his paper-dry liver-spotted hand.

How ironic that when they’d been married, she’d never thought of growing old with him. Yet now, years after the annulment, she should think of it with the yearning of an exile, for the homeland that had long ago evicted her.

What if you made one stupid mistake, and it cost you everything you hold dear, your very future? If there was nothing you could ever do to make it right, no way to repair the damage? If you were forever destined to live your life as a shadow, trapped in the wanting of what you can never have?

Amazing what a man thought of, looking at a fully clothed woman who did nothing more provocative than sipping her tea while gazing thoughtfully into the distance.

For the thousandth time he wished he’d just met her. That they were but two strangers traveling together, that such lovely, filthy thoughts did not break him in two, but were only a pleasant pastime as he slowly fell under the spell of her aloof beauty and her hidden intensity.

There were so many stories he could tell her, so many ways to draw her out of her shell. He would have waited with baited breath for her first smile, for the sound of her first laughter. He would be endlessly curious about her, eager to undress her metaphorically as well as physically.

The first holding of hands. The first kiss. The first time he saw her unclothed. The first time they became one.

The first time they finished each other’s sentences.

But no, they’d met long ago, in the furthest years of his childhood. Their chances had come and gone. All they had ahead of them were a tedious road and a final good-bye.

And what then, when you discover this truth? That the carnage of your life, the years of torture and heartache, the loss of your dreams and future, all of this could all have been saved by the simple act of honesty and communication. Would you then be forced to live with the regret, which must surely be more powerful and devastating than all that has come before?

Neither Bryony Asquith nor Leo Marsden are as they first appear. The author gradually provides the reader with both Leo and Bryony’s perspectives on their disastrous marriage and the years since the annulment, along with details of their respective lives before they met. Thus you come to learn about the characters and understand their behaviour.

Not Quite a Husband is an extremely poignant and moving tale, plumbing the depths of emotions with heartbreaking insight and hindsight. Set against the majestic backdrop of India in rebellion, this book, along with the extraordinary Private Arrangements are must-reads for any lover of complex - and at times dark - historical romance.