The Man Who Didn’t Call by Rosie Walsh is the perfect novel for anyone who’s ever waited for a phone call that didn’t come.
Imagine you meet a man, spend seven glorious days together, and fall in love. And it’s mutual: you’ve never been so certain of anything.
So when he leaves for a long-booked holiday and promises to call from the airport, you have no cause to doubt him.
But he doesn’t call.
Your friends tell you to forget him, but you know they’re wrong: something must have happened; there must be a reason for his silence.
What do you do when you finally discover you’re right? That there is a reason – and that reason is the one thing you didn’t share with each other?
The truth.
About the Author:
Rosie Walsh lives in Bristol with her partner and their son. Under the pseudonym Lucy Robinson, Rosie blogged for Marie Claire about love and dating, and published four novels in the UK. The Man Who Didn’t Call is the first novel under her own name.
My Review:
The Man Who Didn’t Call is also published under the title Ghosted in the US and is Rosie Walsh’s first book under her own name. It’s a love story with a dark undertone and a dose of suspense thrown in.
Sarah is a recently divorced woman who is visiting her parents in the UK having relocated to the States when she was a teenager. She meets Eddie, she falls deeply in love with Eddie and he falls deeply in love with her but has a holiday booked to Spain 7 days after they meet. He promises to call her but then he doesn’t! (Hence the name of the book!).
She can’t let it go and refuses to believe that what they had together during those 7 days wasn’t real love and despite her friends advice she won’t stop searching until she finds out the truth.
I don’t normally read romance so this is a real change of genre for me and takes me out of my comfort zone, however because there is a simmering of tension throughout the book and a dark undertone of something tragic and awful that happened to Sarah and her family in the past it became less of a romance and more of a domestic drama story for me.
This books covers lots of topics including grief, mental illness, guilt and bullying and whilst I certainly had my suspicions of where this story was heading, I was on a couple of occasions totally wrong!
It’s an easy read and whilst the reviews are mixed, I enjoyed her style of writing and found most of the characters engaging and plausible. An enjoyable escape from my usual crime and violence.
