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    The Story of Our Lives
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    The Story of Our Lives
    Unavailable
    The Story of Our Lives
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Story of Our Lives

    Written by Helen Warner

    Narrated by Imogen Church

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    ‘A fascinating exploration of friendship. Compelling, twisty, emotional and believable – I loved it.’ Sarah Morgan Four friends. Twenty years. One powerful secret.

    Everyone remembers where they were on 31st August 1997, the day Princess Diana died.

    Sophie, Emily, Amy and Melissa certainly do -– a beautiful cottage in Southwold, at the start of an annual tradition to have a weekend away together.

    Every year since, the four best friends have come back together. But over time the changes in their lives have led them down very different paths. And it’s when those paths collide that the secrets they’ve been keeping come tumbling out.

    One Day meets Big Little Lies in this unputdownable read about four friends, one long-buried secret and the histories we all share..

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateFeb 8, 2018
    ISBN9780008202644
    Unavailable
    The Story of Our Lives
    Author

    Helen Warner

    Helen Warner is a former Head of Daytime at both ITV & Channel 4, where she was responsible for a variety of TV shows including Come Dine With Me, Loose Women, Good Morning Britain and Judge Rinder. Helen writes her novels on the train to work in London from her home in Essex, which she shares with her husband and their two children.

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    Reviews for The Story of Our Lives

    3.5/5

    19 ratings7 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Good book, solid characters. A bit repetitive but enjoyable still.
    • 4/5
      Four friends go away for a girls’ weekend every year – when they can – to decompress, relax, reaffirm their friendship, share their lives and support each other through good and bad. Each one has a distinctive story and sometimes they overlap and sometimes one friend is the focus. The chapters start with a real life event ie: Princess Diana’s death, the Challenger disaster, 9/11, and so on to place the reader in time and remind them of one of the biggest bits of news of that year. The book then moves back and forth in time within each chapter slowly building each woman’s story – not necessarily in time order. (This did take a little getting used to.)The four core women each have their lives outside of their friendship but little is seen of those lives for these women but for Sophie who is, of any of them, the main character. She arranges their weekends and the other women’s stories involve her in ways big and small. She is a well developed and complicated character – at times a bit one note but for the most part I’d like to have her on my side. The other women are complex and simple all at the same time. I wondered if their secrets were there for the sole reason to bring attention to them. I don’t want to go any deeper into them so as to not ruin plot points but they cover the major sins as it were.The book, it’s prose that is, was very easy to read. At times the topics covered made it a bit of challenge which is fine. Reading should challenge us at times. It should make us think further than the book in front of our eyes – hopefully to educate even to make a change. Chick lit doesn’t have to just be light and fluffy – not to say that there isn’t a lot of light, happy moments in this book. I doubt I’m ruining anything by saying that there is happiness found within the covers of the novel. It is a solid book dealing with challenging issues of love, friendship, marriage, work/life balance and more. I will look forward to more from Ms. Warner in the future.
    • 4/5
      The title is most appropriate because honestly there is no way to tell simply ONE woman's story here without hitting on another's and another's and...well you get the picture. Such are the lives of friends, intertwined, overlapping, and filled to the brim with shared moments and histories; some for the better, some for worse, but any load is easier to carry when shared.

      Now, we all know that no one can truly be boiled down to simply ONE label, nor should they be, but this is how I came to think of this quartet of wonderful women while I was reading...

      Sophie - the rock
      Emily - the realist
      Amy - the perfectionist
      Melissa - the free spirit

      It was the story of them all, as the years pass, the secrets build, and the friendships cement into something more. True, things got ugly at times, for them and between them, but their connection was built of stronger stuff than all the craptastic things the world could throw at them. May we all be so lucky as to find that type of relationship in our lifetimes.


      **copy received for review
    • 4/5
      Title...The Story Of Our LivesAuthor...Helen WarnerMy " in a nutshell" summary...Four women...who met as young women in college...try to spend at least one weekend a year at a “weekend getaway”. Sophie, Melissa, Emily and Amy each have their own secrets and heartaches. Their time together helps them to see their lives more clearly in a sort of unfiltered way. They each also have various strengths and weaknesses as they live out their very different lives. Their getaway is special but they do live in close proximity to each other so it’s easy for them to stay in touch and be there for each other when needed. My thoughts after reading this book...I really enjoyed this book. There was enough drama to really hold my interest. Amy had husband issues, Sophie had husband issues, Emily and Melissa had lack of husband issues. What I loved about this book...I really did love the way the writer told this story. It was very readable. The issues seemed viable. Some things were a bit predictable but that didn’t really bother me. I didn’t really want to put this book away. We just happened to have a huge wind storm and power outage while I was reading this book. This book made the hours in the outage fly! Final thoughts...Would this be a good choice for you...potential reader?Readers who love books with lots of issues and a ton of dysfunction should enjoy this book...I did! I received an advance reader’s copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley and Amazon. It was my choice to read it and review it.
    • 3/5
      Think of your closest friends. Now imagine that you are lucky enough to have a girls weekend with them every year. If you live close to each other and see each other constantly, the weekend is generally a happy escape from the pressures and duties of daily life. On the other hand, if you don't often see these friends, the weekend offers a wonderful chance to reconnect and to catch up in a relaxed atmosphere. Now imagine doing this annually for fifteen years. How many life changes and challenges, good and bad, will come up over such a long span of time? These imaginings are exactly what Helen Warner's novel, The Story of Our Lives, offers to readers.Sophie, Melissa, Amy, and Emily have been friends since living together their first year of university. Now they are launched in the real world but they make it a point to get together every year for a long weekend. The women are very different personalities and lead very different lives but they retain a strong and caring bond with each other, despite the inevitable secrets, large and small, they each carry. As their lives unscroll through the novel, the women will face many different issues: love and sex, infidelity, marriage, motherhood, postpartum depression, domestic abuse, drug addiction, miscarriage, and life-threatening illness among others. They face these issues both alone and collectively, as the friends rally around each other and offer each other some hard truths. But even amongst this close knit group, there is at least one explosive, potentially life and group altering secret.The novel spans fifteen years in the friends' lives. Each section starts with a major true news event from the year (1997 through 2012) to ground the following short chapters in that time. Each section takes place during that year's girls weekend, where the friends will come together to confront the biggest issue of one of their lives to date. Because of this, the first chapter of every year starts with the women arriving for the weekend but quickly segues into flashbacks of the previous year giving added background to the important issue. This narrative structure took a bit of getting used to in the beginning but because of its consistency throughout the novel, eventually it became unobtrusive. The four women are all main characters but despite the third person omniscient narration, Sophie is more rounded out than the others and is just slightly more of the focus, the glue that holds the women together. There is not a strong through plot here for much of the book; the novel is episodic in feel with quick snapshots of the incidents in their lives so it is no surprise to discover Warner works in television and the book itself feels as if it would easily translate to the small screen. The description of each vacation rental and the women's arrivals each year might seem slightly repetitious but the progression of size and luxury in the homes they rent reflects the superficial progression in their lives as well. It is, of course, only after they settle in that they can confront the harder work of friendship, what it can support, what it can endure, and what it celebrates. The novel is generally breezy despite the myriad of heavy topics and it's a fast and easy read. Those who enjoy drama, soap operas, and escapist fiction will enjoy this for sure.
    • 4/5
      Four friends go away for a girls’ weekend every year – when they can – to decompress, relax, reaffirm their friendship, share their lives and support each other through good and bad. Each one has a distinctive story and sometimes they overlap and sometimes one friend is the focus. The chapters start with a real life event ie: Princess Diana’s death, the Challenger disaster, 9/11, and so on to place the reader in time and remind them of one of the biggest bits of news of that year. The book then moves back and forth in time within each chapter slowly building each woman’s story – not necessarily in time order. (This did take a little getting used to.)The four core women each have their lives outside of their friendship but little is seen of those lives for these women but for Sophie who is, of any of them, the main character. She arranges their weekends and the other women’s stories involve her in ways big and small. She is a well developed and complicated character – at times a bit one note but for the most part I’d like to have her on my side. The other women are complex and simple all at the same time. I wondered if their secrets were there for the sole reason to bring attention to them. I don’t want to go any deeper into them so as to not ruin plot points but they cover the major sins as it were.The book, it’s prose that is, was very easy to read. At times the topics covered made it a bit of challenge which is fine. Reading should challenge us at times. It should make us think further than the book in front of our eyes – hopefully to educate even to make a change. Chick lit doesn’t have to just be light and fluffy – not to say that there isn’t a lot of light, happy moments in this book. I doubt I’m ruining anything by saying that there is happiness found within the covers of the novel. It is a solid book dealing with challenging issues of love, friendship, marriage, work/life balance and more. I will look forward to more from Ms. Warner in the future.
    • 4/5
      This is a wonderful story about 4 friends during 20 years of their lives. Even though they are best friends, they all live very different lives and only get together for an occasional weekend. More importantly, even though they are best friends who tell each other everything -- they are all keeping secrets from each other. Can their friendship survive when these secrets are brought out into the open?The novel is set up in time periods based on the friends' weekend get-aways. Each section starts with a short comment about what is going on in the world - ex Princess Diane died or the search for Madeline McCain - to put the time period in perspective. The four friends are:Sophie (my favorite) who moved in with her boyfriend after her first year of college and follows a fairly sensible life - buys a house, has a baby but when she can't bond with her baby, we start to learn more about her. She was always the voice of reason among the four friends.Melissa is always ready for a good time - another drink or another drug and always another man. She has a job in the music industry and is the wild-child of the group.Amy is beautiful and charming and finds a rich husband and appears to have a perfect life...but can she share her problems with that life with her friends?Emily is a single mother who was the smart one in college. She is raising her son by herself and refuses to tell her friends who her son's father is.This is a fantastic book about a long term friendship between women that deals with real world problems - abuse, addiction, infidelity. The main characters are well written - not too perfect with flaws that make them more realistic. The bonds of their friendship get tested over and over as their secrets are revealed and the reader is anxious to find out if they are all able to maintain their friendships or if the secrets they are keeping will end it.Thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book to read and review. All opinions are my own.