And Notre Dame Is Burning

by Miriam Robinson

'Miriam Robinson is an incredible writer and this is an astounding debut . . . This will definitely be on prize lists' Nina Pottell, Prima Magazine

'A beautiful account of one woman's story that shines with the truth of all our stories' Sophie Ward, author of Love and Other Thought Experiments

'Robinson's debut is exceptional' Katie Fraser, The Bookseller

'A heartbreakingly beautiful novel about the beginnings and ends of life and love and marriage, with echoes of Claire Kilroy and Miranda July in its honesty about the female experience. Miriam Robinson is a vital new voice in literary fiction, and I can't wait to see what she does next' Hattie Williams, author of Bitter Sweet

'A stunning exploration of betrayal' Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure for Sleep

I find myself wondering what would have happened if I had been more clear. If our relationship had not begun with this one tiny untruth.

Time has flattened for Esther.

Her storybook marriage begins, and ends, in the shadow of Notre Dame cathedral. Sifting through the ashes of their years together, a time now collapsed by grief, she finds a mismatched mountain lions, a Paris bookshop, bad dancing, bad faith, marshland, prairieland, miscarriage, motherhood, bagels, Eve.

In order to understand this new story, Esther seeks help - from generations of women, from a book about evolution, from a friendly philosopher/scientist with a solid grasp of the space-time continuum.

Mostly, though, she writes - fragments, notes, letters - tracing a fine line between a story that soothes and one that suffocates; confronting the impossibility of communicating anything in the right way, at the right moment, to her daughter. Esther writes, and rewrites, until time slowly takes shape again.

This extraordinary debut is an excavation of betrayal, of motherhood, of time and timelessness, of guilt and consequence, of love coming to an end. Told with dry wit and a startling ferocity, And Notre Dame is Burning heralds an urgent new voice in literary fiction.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

370 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 7, 2025

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

London-based, American writer Miriam Robinson originally set out to produce a straightforward, “tidy” novel building on aspects of her family’s complicated history. But her project was derailed by events in her personal life, first a particularly traumatic miscarriage then revelations about her husband’s behaviour that led to a bitter divorce. Robinson’s semi-autobiographical debut is an attempt both to defamiliarize and address the fallout from this accumulation of losses. The fragmented form was partly inspired by advice given to Robinson by her writing coach. The narrative moves backwards and forwards in time, comprised of a patchwork of letters, snatched thoughts, brief notes, recreations of conversations. At its centre is Esther wrestling with unresolved grief, striving to find her footing and work out how best to parent her young daughter Annie. A process which she sometimes thinks through in a series of letters to Noa Lynn the child who never was.

It's a highly referential piece which reflects Esther’s struggles to make sense of her life through outside sources, as well as to reconcile grappling with individual chaos with existing in an increasingly disordered, unpredictable world. Robinson’s title reinforces Esther’s sense of disorder, of uncertainty and impermanence, by invoking the conflagration that destroyed Paris’s landmark Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019. A building that had stood since medieval times. Paris is where Esther met her former husband Ravi but it’s also tied to memories of being unfairly picked up by the police for her alleged complicity in someone else’s crimes. The French detectives were keen to link Esther to another detainee, a man about whom she’s asked, “Vous connaissez cet homme?” This encounter haunts Esther setting off a chain of associations, stirring question upon question. Some are intimate, reflecting her unsettling realisation that she doesn’t really know, maybe never really knew, the man she married. Others are inspired by Cat Bohannon’s Eve – a book that had a profound impact on Robinson herself. For Esther the figure of Eve and the idea of original sin, leads to contemplating broader judgements about women and knowledge, issues of gender and misogyny – the external and the deeply internalised. The burden, the sheer weight, of responsibility placed on women.

Knowledge, what Esther knows about men, about relationships, makes her deeply uneasy as Annie’s mother. What should she tell Annie about inhabiting the world as a woman, from weaponised male incompetence to becoming the object of men’s uninvited desires? What bonds between women might sustain her and have sustained Esther? Threats both real and potential preoccupy Esther. There are echoes of Lucy Ellmann in Esther’s fascination with lost mountain lion P55 who’s both menacing and intensely vulnerable, force of nature in Trump’s America where nature has no currency. Esther wonders too about writing, about the ways in which narrative has been deployed to mould experience, shaping it into tangible, containable forms. Mindful of authors like Rachel Cusk and the backlash against Cusk’s intimate account of the breakdown of her marriage, Esther weaves different stories about Ravi and his numerous infidelities, naming each woman Eve from Eve one to Eve six. A way of refusing their specificity but highlighting their pivotal role in the fall of her marriage.

Robinson’s carefully-crafted writing could be impressive. There were numerous striking passages and arresting images. But it also felt a little too well-crafted at times, at least for my taste, overly engineered, elegant when it should have been messy, occasionally verging on contrived. For all its inventiveness, its comparatively unorthodox structure, the underlying story is very conventional, as is Esther who’s finding it difficult to let go of her dream of the perfect, nuclear family. It didn’t help that I never felt entirely convinced by Esther's character - even when her observations about gender were relatively relatable. I found Esther's claims not to have recognised that marriage could be a “trap” or that “dependence on men can be dangerous” an odd mix of naïve and disingenuous. I was intrigued by how Ravi's represented too. He often seemed quite stock, stereotypical both as “cheating” husband and as British Asian man. I was puzzled by various scenes which underlined how little Esther knew, or tried to find out, about his heritage or his cultural background. I wasn’t clear if that was what Robinson intended or not. Nor is it clear why Esther is so fixated on the misogyny that her daughter will encounter but not with how, for Annie, misogyny will be inflected by racism. There’s a twist of a kind at the end which casts doubt on Esther’s framing of her life with Ravi which I found equally unsettling- it undermines many of Esther's earlier claims. So overall, I think this is a well-written piece just not one that completely worked for me. Although I feel really guilty saying that given the subject matter, especially since Robinson has referred to her book as a ritual of sorts, a means of mourning or laying a troubled past to rest.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Corsair for an ARC

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ravi is in the bookshop when it happens. He climbs onto the roof and begins to film with his phone and posts the videos, all in one long thread, one after the next after the next. The TV networks use his footage, call him for comment. He is all over the news. He is someone who is acting in the world. My parents, in America, see him on the news. My friends, everywhere, see the videos, which are viewed by thousands. At 5 a.m., as the last line of his thread, he tweets to the world:

Across from this spot where the flames burn now, my wife and I kissed for the first time. But things change: the years have passed, it is time to divorce. And Notre Dame is burning.

And Notre Dame is Burning is a fascinating debut novel and one I hope to see featured on prize lists, perhaps starting with the Goldsmiths Prize.

The novel is narrated in the first person by Esther - or at least that’s how her future self addresses her past self, but this is a novel where most characters are known by pseudonyms.

Told in fragmentary pieces, the novel is perhaps centred around (this is not a novel with a clear centre or a linear progression) the narrator suffering a miscarriage and also finding out that her husband had an affair, or indeed affairs.

Betrayal is a palimpsest. An overwrite. It scrubs most of what was written on your parchment and emblazons a new story in its place, more important, more real and relevant than what was there before. Except little fragmented bits of the old story remain, if you look closely. The ghosts of the old eradicated story haunt the new. Faint, emaciated fingers trying to grasp something they can’t quite hold.

The bookshop featured above is obviously (although not named) the wonderful Shakespeare & Co, which is also where the narrator first met her husband (whose was introduced to her, incorrectly, as Ravi and she has chosen to use that pseudonym here):

The moment –perhaps not the moment I knew I would marry him, but the moment I awoke to his presence –was tiny. So tiny, in fact, and lacking in detail that there is almost no story here, and yet I don’t think there could have been the story of us without this. The four of us were leaving the bookshop. We walked up a few stone steps, ready to cross over onto Île de la Cité (C’est juste en face de Notre Dame, I would tell the rare French person who could not locate the shop). He said something, something infinitesimal but desperately familiar, that made me laugh. It was the kind of laugh that takes you by surprise, that shakes your shoulders before your mind has fully caught up to the joke. I couldn’t unsee him after that.

I don’t remember the joke, but I remember the laugh.

The novel is largely told in letters addressed (although not necessarily sent) to various people, primarily her miscarried child, but also to the women with whom her husband had affairs (all of who she addressed as Eve), her past self, her husband and her living daughter.

The novel is also in close and respectful dialogue with Cat Bohannon’s 2023 non-fiction work Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and powerfully portrays the modern female experience, contextualising it in history and evolution.

The narrator acknowledges early on how the two key events have collapsed her experience of time, and the novel reflects that with its fragmentary and non-linear structure, where repetition and recurring motifs play a key part.

Probably I do not mean to speak about time at all. Probably what I mean to say is this: I cannot identify when or where this story began. I cannot say if it was this year, when we lived for six months in Switzerland, or before that, at home in London, or before that, when our daughter Annie was born, or before that, when the sky went red over Paris. It might have been before that, when they bulldozed Colorado prairie land to make the Denver suburbs, or before that, when England drew a ragged line through Pakistan and India, or before that, with the killing of the Jews (Which killing? Be specific), or before that, with all the killings of all the Jews. Perhaps it was even before that, when Eve plucked the apple from the tree, or before that, when Miriam and her mother sent Moses downriver in a reed basket, or before that, with the flood. I cannot find the starting line. It is too difficult to say.

As one small example of how the repetition works, the narrator discovers a form of sanctuary in the urban marshes near her London home, but in a first extended piece (which in this book means 2/3rds of a page) on the topic, she explains how she can not really escape there due to various intrusions. Returning to that several times the observations get shorter - I go walking in the marshes. You cannot disappear in the marshes. There is the train from Liverpool Street. There is the pylon. There are the wires. There are the Hasidic Jews and the taunting, prickling plants. - until by the novel’s end simply the line “I go walking in the marshes” is enough to invoke a (Proustian? Pavlovian?) response in the reader who remembers the litany of challenges.

A common feature of debut novels is they can pack too much in - material that might have made future novels. There is an element of that here, but deliberately and effectively so, since the narrator also explains, meta-fictionally, how her writing evolved and various projects she abandoned or left as unfollowed trails. This can though mean that some element of the repetition - one on mountain lines for example - felt to me a little orphaned, and others - notably an incident early in her relationship with Ravi in Paris where she was questioned by the police, accused of being involved in a fraud - though clearly key to the narrator’s message, passed me by to an extent.

The style of the book - the family history; the use of pseudonyms - almost invites you to consider it autofictional. But trying to work out what is real and what fiction is either missing the point, or perhaps the opposite. As the author has said:

“So much of the book was about what’s real and what’s not real – about the ways in which women have been made, time and again, to question their reality and doubt their instincts.”

I must admit to going down a futile rabbit hole trying to identify the documentary that was Ravi’s key project for over a decade, but having more luck with a portrait mentioned (although unable to verify its connection to the author as opposed to the narrator):

I looked again today at the painting of my paternal grandmother and her twin sister, my great-aunt. Really looked at it, the two of them sitting next to each other, in white nightdresses that are just on the wrong side of appropriate for twelve-year-old girls. Of the two of them, I always thought of my great-aunt as the one who looks nervous. Too young to be subjected to a painter’s gaze, she sits slightly lower than my grandmother, with one arm clasped over her stomach. Her hair is longer, more childlike, and she folds over her arm ever so slightly. But now that I look again I see that she has support —the chair, her sister’s hand, even that arm of hers. She is nervous as she looks at the painter, but still she is looking at him. Straight on. It is my grandmother —taller, back straight, bobbed hair held tight with a thick green headband —who looks away, past the artist to somewhere else, as though in her mind she has vacated the room. It could be that she is just bored. Or perhaps she is coping in her own way with the intensity of being scrutinised. Perhaps by looking away she is making the world –or herself –disappear.

Which is The Twins by Boris Grigoriev: https://www.wikiart.org/en/boris-grig...

I realise, reviewing my review, that I have failed to mention at all perhaps the novel’s most powerful, in emotional more than literary terms, writing, which is on the topic of both the physical experience and mental aftermath of miscarriage, something far more common that is talked about and seldom written about in literature. For that alone this would be a wonderful novel, but it is also a brilliant piece of creative writing.

Highly recommended. Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short novel tells the story of Esther and husband Ravi as Esther recounts the beginning and end of their marriage.

Written in prose (in the form of letters to her unborn child, Noa Lynn, and Eve, a woman her husband has been intimate with) Esther guides us through each part of their life as a couple and how she expected certain aspects of it to play out.

Her letters to both the unseen mistress and child are the most poignant parts for me but I felt that a lot of the end of the novel tended to ramble on. I think I wanted more punch to it when few relationships begin and end in fireworks.

I am afraid that this book didn't move me quite as much as I was hoping it was my fault for having these expectations of how the story would play out, given the circumstances.

If you like a thoughtful, measured book that deals with relationships, couple expectations and disappointments then this is for you.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Corsair for the advance review copy.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this as a free mystery book on world bookshop day, which made it more of a treat. a story of a breakdown of a marriage, told in fragmented notes. not for everyone I am sure, but I do love short fragments that say more then a wordy passage sometimes can.

TW: miscarriage

[Laura Standley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Miriam’s writing is present and visceral. It forces you into a psychologically close place where you want to stay. While it’s easy to take down a bit here and a bit there, I took the entire book in in one sitting. It’s so finely wrought, so beautiful. And anything that plays with structure, and does it well, will keep my attention. What a stunning first book by a brilliant, clever author!

[Aoife Cassidy McM · Rating 2 out of 5]

I finished this book in August and let it percolate for a few weeks before writing a review as it wasn't a book that grabbed me in any way at the time of reading. Several weeks on, I can barely remember anything about it, which is a review in and of itself. Fragmented and irritating literary fiction on the breakdown of a marriage. Not for me unfortunately.

Many thanks to Corsair and Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I walk, I write. Or, more specifically, I dictate notes into my phone. I dictate them as a letter, which now feels less indulgent and more like a useful container into which to pour all that is happening. At first I address this letter, like before, to Annie. I try to tell her what it is that I see and feel. I think that I am explaining to her why her world feels precarious. I think that somewhere in her body she already knows what has happened to our family and that maybe one day she can read this letter and it can serve as a guide, to help match words to the sensations. That she’ll be able to map her physical agitation onto something more defined. That she’ll be able to say: I know now what this feeling is. I bring the notes home and I type them up, fixing errors where the phone has misunderstood my accent, editing for coherence, rounding out an idea or a thought. Other things start to come to mind and I write about them too, putting them all into one long letter. I write about mountain lions, and the way they leave their homes and enter ours. I rewrite stories from my novel, as though I can draw a line from the portrait of the twins to the birth of my book to the disappearance of Noa to whatever is dying in our family now. I tell her about Paris. I tell her about me, about my parents’ divorce as I contemplate my own, about the ways in which it split me in two, about how much I fear that for her.

 
Miriam Robinson is it seems something of a book trade world legend with a CV which includes bookseller and Head of Marketing at Foyles, freelance marketer running the British Book Awards (Nibbies), host of the My Unlived Life podcast (where she interviews authors about alternative paths their lives could have taken) and working for the Booker Prize and now Head of Strategy for the Booksellers Association.
 
All of which should help with the marketing of this book but the best marketing for it is her writing as this is one of the best novels I have read this year – both enjoyable and different, engaging and intelligent.
 
The set up of the novel is that the narrator named (or at least named by herself in this novel as) Esther is looking back across her marriage to her documentary filmmaker husband – Ravi in the novel (although that is the name she was mistakenly introduced to him as) who she first meets and first falls in love with in the English Language bookshop where she works opposite Notre Dame (“Shakespeare and Co” of course although not named”; later in the same bookshop and after failed attempts to save their marriage Ravi tweets from the roof of the same bookshop on a viral thread of tragic images he is filming and broadcasting to the world “Across from this spot where the flames burn now, my wife and I kissed for the first time.  But things change: the years have passed; it is time to divorce.  And Notre Dame is burning”.
 
What we are reading is the story of that marriage and its breakdown – of which the pivotal moment is a miscarriage Esther suffers just as the couple (and their young daughter Annie) relocate back to London from a temporary assignment in Zurich.  In the aftermath of her loss as she bickers with Ravi over his seeming lack of support and care, the narrator discovers that Ravi has had an affair (and that over time he has had several).
 
The narrator was we learn trying to write a multi-generational part-family-biographical novel tracing from a 1920s portrait of two twin sisters – and part of what we are reading is built on the ruins of that novel.  But what we are reading now is a mix of narrative and letters written by the narrator but not sent to: her never-born daughter who she names Noa Lynn; herself from the future when divorced writing to herself some years earlier while still with Ravi; the known and unknown women with who Ravi slept; Ravi and (at the novel’s end) Annie. 
 
And over time we are told how the original novel and writing changes and morphs into what we are reading now via different versions (for example including one in which the Noa Lynn letters were addressed to Annie) although with elements of the original (in particularly some multigenerational family biography) remaining.
 
Cat Bohannan (the author is not named) and her inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction longlisted “Eve; How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Yeats of Human Evolution” is key to the novel: frequently referred to with the narrator drawing on the book to understand the concept of how female bodies have not just evolved but draw on the struggles and changes of previous generations (including literally via foetal DNA); the narrator and author (who as the novel points out look superficially similar) are confused for each other and later meet; the narrator names the women her husband has betrayed her with Eve and this leads to riffs on alternate Genesis creation myths and societal placement of guilt on females.
 
Other recurring themes and passages – which are threaded among the epistolary sections and limited narrative in a fragmentary, recurring way include:
 
Ravi’s documentary of a climate protest group which is pulled when one of the activists is arrested – which for me was a sign of his piece of art derailed by a transgression just like the narrator’s novel.
 
Some honesty and hugely resonant writing about miscarriage (and its emotional aftermath) which reminded me of Louisa Hall’s “Reproduction”.
 
Discussions with Ravi’s best friend – a philosopher/scientist on the nature and experience of time and how perspective leads to temporal ordering.
 
Ravi’s refusal to take on the narrator’s request to come clean about the full details of all his affairs – instead repeatedly trying to turn the discussion back to her inadequacies or failings (in some excellently rendered dialogues)
 
The mountain lion P-55 (which many literary fiction readers may know as the narrator of Henry Hoke’s “Open Throat”;
 
A small area of waste ground and marsh near Liverpool Street (I was reminded of Esher Kinsky’s “River”)
 
A scary encounter with the French police after the narrator inadvertently aids a counterfeiting scheme but where the memories revolve around her being asked accusingly “Vous connaissez cet homme” which in turn leads to ideas of what it means to know someone else, including in the biblical sense. 
 
The narrator agonising over how much her open writing about her marriage and about motherhood will hinder or help her child (and her relationships with her) -  “Look what they did to Rachel Cusk!” and later (in a page of its own) “Friends tell me Rachel Cusk and her children seem like they’re OK” we are told.
 
And these literary resonances – some intended by the author, some specific to this reader, are testament (if I can be excused my own biblical reference) to the way in which the very spaces which are key to the typography and pacing in this novel invite the reader to form associations.
 
Perhaps one of the key passages in the novel is when the narrator says “Betrayal is a palimpsest, An overwrite.  It scrubs most of what was written on your parchment and emblazons a new story in its place, more important, more real and relevant than what was there before.  Except little fragmented bits of the old story remain, if you look closely.  The ghosts of the old, eradicated story haunt the new.  Faint, emaciated fingers trying to grasp something they can’t quite hold.”- and this feels very much like a novel itself written across other works as well as one which is of course (by its very nature) fragments of the more conventional historical and family-biographical novel the narrator was going to write.
 
The extent to which the novel is autobiographical/autofictional/purely fictional is deliberately blurred and deliberately integral to the novel which is precisely about the question of what it means (particularly as a woman) to have one’s own story/understanding of one’s own life questioned, undermined and rewritten – and cleverly the novel ends with the narrator about to tell Annie (just before the novel is published) how much of it is true and how much pretend. 
 
I would not be surprised to see this book appear on prize shortlists (in fact disappointed not do).  It would seem ideally placed for the Women’s Prize – but more the Women’s Prize of a few years ago when literary experimentation took equal place alongside accessibility (and produced winners like Ali Smith and Eimear McBride), and so perhaps now better suited for another prize those same authors won (with the same books) – the Goldsmith Prize for literature which breaks the mould.  And here time may be in her favour – as until last year her MA in Creative Writing from the Goldsmiths University would disqualify her, but a new rule (which has a 5 year time limit after leaving the college) makes her eligible and I think a strong contender.
 
My review has I think only touched on this in many ways brief but highly impactful novel.
 
Highly recommended.
 
My thanks to Little, Brown Book Group UK for an ARC via NetGalley
 

This is not really okay, though, addressing this to her. Friends say it first, when I explain it to them. Then my therapist. Then more friends. For a while I do not see it. I want it to be okay. I want to tell her everything. I want her to know all the things my mother never told me, about how impossible marriage is, about the ways women contort themselves to make the men in their lives feel okay. She’ll know eventually anyway. I like the idea that I can put in place a ferocious honesty, to counteract the lies of men. Over time, though, I come to acknowledge, grudgingly, the violence in what I am doing. I cannot tell her these things about her life, not like this. I cannot dictate the terms on which she discovers her own backstory. I cannot use her as a receptacle for all that must come out of me. But then how do you prepare a girl for the world of men? How do you tell her about the world into which she’s been born, about the air she breathes and the system in which she operates, without ruining her forever? How do you write your own story without insisting that it be hers? Then I wonder if she is not the intended recipient at all. Perhaps it is because Ravi will not listen. His certainty, his insistence on his own moral standing makes me question whether he is right that there is nothing to see here, that there really is no reason for all this fuss, and that, frankly, I started it. If he will not listen, then perhaps I need at least to imagine that there is someone, somewhere, who can hold this story. Someone who will receive me when I say that I have been wronged. I change the salutation. Dear Noa Lynn, I write, and the notes fall out of me without effort.

[Gabrielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

ahhh wowww this book was beautiful.

I personally love prose fiction — this novel is written as a series of letters that read like vignettes, which was such a delightfully unique format. It basically centers on a woman trying to make sense of her broken marriage, looking back over her husband’s affairs and exploring the ways it has derailed her life and identity. What really set this apart, though, thematically, was the amount of the story that was dedicated to the mother trying to figure out how much or how little of the truth to tell her young daughter. I feel that this is often overlooked in a lot of the infidelity narratives I’ve read, and I found this really thoughtful and it made it so much more touching.

The narrator’s attempts to rationalize/blame herself/figure out what she could have done differently to be a better wife/mother/partner/person is too real, and I found myself relating to it sooo much (to a nearly uncomfortable extent, but isn’t that what good literature does?).

I truly loved this book. Although at times I felt some of the metaphors were contrived, or that some of the vignettes ended with lines that were slightly too explanatory, my overall reading experience was brilliant and just so immersive. It’s funny, it’s touching, and brutally honest. Thank you Serpent’s Tail for the copy!

[Laura Spira · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this rather tedious. Esther, the central character, is recovering from the trauma of a miscarriage while facing the challenge of parenting in a collapsing marriage but I found it difficult to be sympathetic to her plight as she was so self-centred and self pitying. The other characters were all two dimensional and equally unsympathetic. Not sure why her family had to be Jewish since they were not apparently religiously observant or even identifying culturally. The title seemed to me to be quite irrelevant to the story, the Notre Dame fire was used as a rather clumsy metaphor. The conceit of telling the story through fragmentary letters to the unborn child, and to others, wore rather thin

[Grace Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robinson’s literary voice is so unique and beautiful that I am finding myself unfathomably upset that this is her debut and I cannot continue to read her works after reaching the end of ‘And Notre Dame is Burning’. A heartbreaking yet powerful insight into what it means to be a woman, a mother, a human in the midst of the ever changing world. The fragmented chapters - with some not even reaching 10 words - is woven into the novel’s description of time and space so intrinsically and makes the read all the more engaging. I read all 300+ pages in a day, and any time spent not reading will filled with contemplating the message of the novel. A must read; one of the best of 2025 so far.

[ash florence · Rating 5 out of 5]

“maybe to get time to move again you have to be willing to know loss, in the biblical sense: to wrap your arms around the shape of it and let it wrap its arms around you back. maybe you have to know, boldly, what you have lived.”

[Taylor Marie Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book at Shakespeare & Company in Paris in October, and it was such a treat to read it! I sat next to the author in the café next door, and I felt led to purchase it. I loved the honest, raw, poetic format. I also loved the Next to Normal reference!

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning novel by a debut novelist. Poetic, inventive, thoughtful and gripping.

[Lynsey Passmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much, sublime in its prose, beautiful, haunting and so full of emotion. There are many chords that resonate and the message is one of solidarity.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong start, dipped a bit in the middle, strong end. And what a powerful list of Acknowledgments.

[Sarah Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful book

This novel tells the story of a breakdown of a marriage and the heartbreak of a miscarriage .
The author has a very unique and poetic writing style making the language as she uses beautiful words really to savour and think about. this is a lot to take your time and drink in the emotions
Sections of the book are set at the time where Notre Dame had a catastrophic fire and the catastrophe of the physical building burning is compared to the emotional difficulties, the main character is having. We all saw the burning building on the television news when it happened and the main character characters experience of this firsthand anchors the novel.
The book jumps around through time periods often as letters written to an unborn child. I do find it quite difficult when novelists do this but ultimately found that this book was worth spending time with
I can’t really think of a book that is similar that I can compare it to. This book is for lovers of the literary novel and primarily character based stories.
I read a copy of the novel on NetGalley UK. In return for an honest review The book was published in the UK on the 7th of August 2025 by little Brown book group UK.

This review will appear on NetGalley UK, Goodreads, StoryGraph, and my book blog bionicSarahSbooks.wordpress.com
It will also appear on Amazon and Waterstones online