Leo and Emma are a blissfully happy couple who live in London with their three-year-old daughter, Ruby, and their dog John Keats. When Rosie Walsh’s novel The Love of My Life opens, the couple are waiting for news about Emma’s cancer: has her treatment worked? Her diagnosis necessitates Emma’s covert communication with an unnamed person.

I started having vivid, photo-real dreams about us meeting, the feel of his skin, the smell of his hair. And so, when the thought came to mind–I want to call–I didn’t immediately dismiss it.

[…]

A few days after the diagnosis, I caved and made the phone call.

Then she reveals that she has been lying to Leo. Soon the reader will discover that Walsh misses no opportunity to lie to the reader, either.

Leo, an obituarist, starts to suspect that his wife has been keeping secrets and goes on a hunt to discover the truth. So, readers will have both perspective: Emma increasingly feeling trapped by her lies and Leo increasingly desperate to find out just what in the heck is going on with the one persona in all the world that he trusts.

And for the first half of the book, I was happy to go along because I didn’t have a sweet clue what was happening and I was okay with that. The misdirection wasn’t as annoying as it later became because in the second half of the novel I felt less like I was following Leo as he discovered the truth and more like the truth was being told to me. Suddenly the motivations just seemed a little too insert A into B.

This is less thriller and more family drama. If you like that sort of thing, you’d probably like The Love of My Life.