ineke.co.uk

My annual Cecelia Ahern read! I’ve found she tends to write two kinds of books, all fiction, but either with or without an element of magical realism, so whenever I start a new one, it’s interesting to see which it will be! In this case, it’s just general fiction, but a story I really got invested in.

Enya is a GP, and driving home from a call out during awful weather on the shortest day of the year she comes across the scene of an accident, a teenager in the road, and a man who says he just drove up and found him there. She obviously stops to help, but where she’d been struggling mentally with approaching the age her mother died, and following this trauma, she decides it’s time for a big change.

The story continues both with her adapting to her new life, while also dealing with the fall out from that night, and gradually finding out more about what happened, so that by the end of the book, we have the full story.

The book is broken into different times of the astronomical year, her mother had an interest in pagan ideas, and there’s a rag tree involved in the story – I was a bit concerned at one point about how pagan-y it might get, but it really wasn’t much at all in the end.

I enjoyed seeing how Enya’s relationships with her son, her sister, and others she meets along the way change and develop through the book, and particularly with the woman who lives above her surgery who is going through her own struggles.