The Haunting / Review of My Lover's Lover by Maggie O'Farrell - V23 May/June 2003

Giving up the Ghost

Midway through Maggie O' Farrell's new novel, My Lover's Lover, a woman who finds herself haunted by the ghost of another woman stumbles into a used book shop and finds that everything she had thought to be true, her entire set of trusted perceptions about her current living situation, are completely, and somewhat inexplicably, wrong. Such shifts in perception, and the ever-changing possibilities of what may or may not be real, lay at the heart of My Lover's Lover, a book as strangely beautiful as it is confounding.

In the novel, a young woman named Lily, finds herself suddenly and uncontrollably drawn to her new flat mate Marcus, but as her attraction for him continues to intensity, so does the mystery regarding his recently departed girlfriend, whom Lily is simply told is "no longer with us." Soon enough, however, this lost girlfriend appears everywhere, haunting Lily in ways that seem impossible, and completely incomprehensible. Thus, the novel becomes what O' Farrell refers to as a kind of "domestic gothic thing", in which the surface of ordinary life, and the choices inherent in it, take on a menacing and unusually haunting significance. Perfectly plotted and deftly orchestrated, the novel unfolds in a kind of delicately fractured origami, revealing itself in ways that are not only shocking, but seem satisfyingly true.

Such cleverly menacing material is nothing new to O'Farrell, already a best-selling author in the UK, her first novel, After You'd Gone, deals with similarly murky subtext, the often devastating consequences of even our most seemingly simple and benign choices.

Viking will publish my Lover's Lover in June 2003.

- T. Cole Rachel