Score: 5/5 Bookmarks

Thank you to Ballantine Books for gifting me a review copy of The Two Lives of Lydia Bird by Josie Silver.

How is this my first Silver book? I loved it so much, and I’ll admit that I basically wept the entire way through…luckily it’s allergy season so I could blame my red eyes on pollen.

Lydia has been with Freddie since they were kids basically. They’re still so in love, and best friends. She can’t imagine a life without him in it. But on her 28th birthday, Freddie dies in a car accident. We follow Lidia for the next year or so as she battles her grief, the ‘what ifs’, and tries to put her life back together.

Through a strange twist of fate, Lydia discovers she can visit what seems to be a parallel timeline where Freddie is still alive. She’s able to cross back and forth, but despite the relief and joy at getting to see him again it starts to take a toll on her.

This story was so incredibly beautiful, and heartbreaking at the same time. I wasn’t kidding about weeping the whole way through it. But as much as it broke my heart, I couldn’t put it down. I was so drawn into their world, the characters, and thinking about what I would do if I ever found myself in that situation.

If you haven’t read this one yet I definitely recommend it. I also listened to part of it on audiobook and it was wonderfully narrated by Olivia Vinall. It comes in at just under twelve hours long and you can grab the audiobook here, or get a physical copy via the button below.

Synopsis:

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 her twenty-eighth birthday, Freddie died in a car accident.

So now it's just Lydia, and all she wants to do is 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 across the doorway of 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.

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.