Book Review: Without Her by Rosalind Brackenbury

Rosalind Brackenbury’s Without Her is a thoughtful and beautifully-written piece of women’s fiction.  Claudia is living in America where she’s approaching retirement from her job as a lecturer in film studies when she learns that her lifelong friend, Hannah, (the Her of the title) has gone missing. Claudia drops everything to fly to the south of France where Hannah’s husband, Philip, is waiting at the family holiday home for Hannah to turn up. The story is slender in terms of action but that doesn’t matter. It’s many-layered and thought-provoking, picking up on themes of social obligation, of sacrifice, of control over one’s own life. Claudia is the narrator and as she and Philip wait to see whether Hannah (who has something of a history of disappearing and reappearing) will turn up, she reviews their friendship and their fallouts, the things they did together and the things that kept them apart. 

The writing is terrific. I could feel the heat of the summer sun on the back of my neck and smell the lavender; I could sense Claudia’s emotions and feel the tension as concerns for Hannah’s welfare began to rise. The problem for me, though, was that no matter how well the book was written and constructed I didn’t enjoy it as much as it probably merited. 

The reason? I really, really didn’t warm to any of the characters, with the possible exception of Philip. Hannah was positively dislikable, an attention-seeking diva who put her nearest and dearest through stress and misery in the name of her own self-obsession, and all of those people she hurt seemed to adore her all the more because of it. The end of the book raised questions that I should have been more interested in answering than I was, but when it got to the end I’m afraid I really wasn’t invested enough to care what happened to Hannah. 

It’ a shame, because it’s otherwise an excellent book, highly accomplished. But I’m afraid I really, really wasn’t engaged enough to give it five stars. 

Thanks to Netgalley and Dreamscape Media for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.