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Published Mar 2020
384 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Two lives. Two loves. One impossible choice. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Reese's Book Club Pick One Day in December.
Written with Josie Silver's trademark warmth and wit, The Two Lives of Lydia Bird is a powerful and thrilling love story about the what-ifs that arise at life's crossroads, and what happens when one woman is given a miraculous chance to answer them.
Lydia and Freddie. Freddie and Lydia. They'd been together for more than a decade and Lydia thought their love was indestructible. But she was wrong. On Lydia's twenty-eighth birthday, Freddie died in a car accident.
So now it's just Lydia, and all she wants is to hide indoors and sob until her eyes fall out. But Lydia knows that Freddie would want her to try to live fully, happily, even without him. So, enlisting the help of his best friend, Jonah, and her sister, Elle, she takes her first tentative steps into the world, open to life—and perhaps even love—again.
But then something inexplicable happens that gives her another chance at her old life with Freddie. A life where none of the tragic events of the past few months have happened.
Lydia is pulled again and again through the doorway to her past, living two lives, impossibly, at once. But there's an emotional toll to returning to a world where Freddie, alive, still owns her heart. Because there's someone in her new life, her real life, who wants her to stay.
"Through lush prose, expert plotting, and richly imagined characters, Silver offers an achingly real portrait of grief transposed with the character's intoxicating parallel universe. This will stay with readers long after the final page is turned." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"At its core, this is a story of love lost and individual growth. But it is also about love found and future happiness. While this is in many ways the complete opposite of Linda "Holmes' Evvie Drake Starts Over, fans of that book will enjoy it. A story that thoughtfully takes readers to the Hollywood ending they can see coming." - Kirkus Reviews
"I read The Two Lives of Lydia Bird in a single sitting—crying, laughing, and rooting for the heroine, who reminds us that the people we love, and the people we lose, change us, and that who we are at the beginning of our story is never who we are at the end of it. What a beautiful, emotional gift Josie Silver has given us." - Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Things and A Spark of Light
This information about The Two Lives of Lydia Bird was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Josie Silver's debut novel, One Day in December, was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Josie lives in a small town in the UK with her husband, their sons, and an ever-changing cast of animals.
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