The Last Letter from Your Lover

May 16, 2011
Elegiac yet emotionally ablaze, what could have been merely another love story is instead a graceful examination of grand events. In 1960s England, 27-year-old Jennifer Stirling awakens in the hospital after a terrible accident, suffering acute memory loss. As the past makes its too-slow return, Jennifer employs the skillful deception of an actress in order to cope, but soon realizes that she doesn't love her husband, a man of great wealth from mining operations in the Congo. Stumbling across a haunting love letter sent to her by a man identified only as "B," Jennifer tries to reconcile what is clearly a great passion with the crippling social mores of her day and class. As she examines her heart and mind, the story skips from London to the French Riviera and the Congo in the midst of an anticolonial war. In 2003, English journalist Ellie Haworth stumbles across one of B's letters to Jennifer while researching a story, dragging her into ancient passions and sparking her to examine her own heart. With poetic prose and affecting characters, Moyes's (Night Music) genuinely captivating tale resonates deeply in today's fast-paced, less gracious world.

Starred review from April 1, 2011

A prize-winning, cross-generational love story of missed connections and delayed gratification hits a seam of pure romantic gold.

Star-crossed is an understatement for the ill-fated love between trophy wife Jennifer Stirling and hard-drinking journalist Anthony O'Hare in British writer Moyes' cleverly constructed, cliffhanger-strewn tale of heartache in two strikingly different eras. Jennifer and Anthony meet in the South of France in that strait-laced time just before the 1960s blew social conventions apart. Jennifer, married to a powerful businessman whose fortunes derive from asbestos, is a Grace Kelly look-alike, beautiful and seemingly blessed with a perfect life. But as the story opens with her attempts to reconstruct her existence after post–traffic-accident amnesia it becomes apparent that her marriage has a cold heart compared to recently experienced passion. Held back by convention and fear, she hesitates to grasp her first chance at happiness. Later, other and larger impediments stand between the two lovers whose commitment finds expression in letters which come to light again 40 years later in the library of a relocated newspaper. Journalist Ellie Haworth, involved with a married man, is moved by the words and starts to piece the story together, in the process coming to a different understanding of what love really means.

A nicely judged sense of period and the author's full-blooded commitment lend heartfelt emotion to simple characters in a tour de force of its kind.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 15, 2011

S.J. Watson's Before I Got To Sleep. Alice LaPlante's Turn of Mind. Protagonists with failed or fading memories are all the rage. In this latest from British novelist/journalist Moyes, Jennifer Stirling awakens with no memory from a terrible accident. Then she finds a letter fervently begging her to abandon her husband and run away with the writer, identified only as "B." Decades later, a journalist named Ellie discovers the letter in her newspaper's file and determines to solve the mystery and bring together the long-lost lovers--all while landing a front-page story. The word unputdownable figures prominently in the British raves.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2011
The year is 1960. Jennifer Stirling awakes in the hospital, suffering from amnesia after a car crash. Though she returns to her life as a wealthy industrialist's wife, she feels like a stranger in her own skin until she stumbles across a letter signed B that suggests she'd been having an affair. In flashbacks, Moyes (The Peacock Emporium, 2005) reveals the mystery man's identity as well as the missed connections that have drastic consequences for the lovers. Fast forward to 2003, when reporter Ellie Haworth also discovers letters from B to Jennifer in her newspaper's archives. Drawn to the missives' passionate language, which starkly contrasts with the terse texts she receives from her married lover, Ellie becomes obsessed with learning what happened to the star-crossed duo. Toggling between two eras, Moyes cleverly juxtaposes the conventions of old-fashioned and thoroughly modern romance. Readers will be tempted to flip to the final page to see whether Jennifer and Ellie earn their happy endings but should resist. Moyes' surprising plot twists and revelations are worth savoring.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)