The Woman Who Came Back To Life

"He'd long been a complete blank, his behaviour inexplicable, his motives unknown. To find out, after all this time, what he was really thinking might be unbearable."

The Woman Who Came Back To Life is the fifth novel by British author, Beth Miller. A phone call in the middle of a private French wood turns the ordered life that Pearl Flowers had been leading upside down. Her older brother Greg rings with the news that the father from whom she and her brothers have been estranged for some thirty years, is dying.

No one, not her brother, not her ever-protective husband Denny, is more surprised than Pearl that she feels an urgent need to be there. Too late for last words with her father, she and Denny reluctantly hang around for the hastily-arranged funeral of Francis Nichols, partly because this is a requirement for the mysterious legacy he has left Pearl.

After the expected bequests of property and cash are dealt with, the solicitor tries to hand over a bag of notebooks to Pearl amid vociferous objections from Jeanie and Andrea Nichols, her father's second wife and step-daughter. It seems Francis has written private journals for the previous thirty-seven years, and several of the family want to have first sight of what could be sensitive material.

"'They cover the period from 1981 to 2018. I believe the final entry was made only a few weeks before his death.' A chill ran down my spine. My dad's life, laid out, for the entire period that I didn't know him."

The catch is that they are written in a shorthand that Francis taught Pearl. She returns to France in possession of her father's legacy to her, not at all sure she wants to read the words of a man who ignored or rejected her attempts at communication after he abandoned her mother and his children. "I stopped writing to Dad then, and eventually, after some rough years of grieving the father I'd loved, I more or less stopped thinking about him, too."

Those journals sitting in her study are unsettling enough; contact with the family she left behind after a traumatic event is unnerving; the trespasser apparently living in the woods around their secluded little refuge from the world adds to her unease; harassment from her step-sister Andrea about the diaries increases her stress levels; and then there's a phone call from a young woman…

One of her dying mother's last requests is that Caroline Haskett attends the funeral and take her measure of the family. The other is that she contact Pearl, something Carrie has no real desire to do. She has managed well for thirty-five years without, and is quite busy enough being the single mother of baby Emmie. But she has made a promise.

The story is carried by three separate narratives: Pearl and Carrie relate in the present day while entries from the journals Francis kept describe past events, giving an alternative, if not always reliable, perspective. The novel's back-cover blurb is a little misleading, giving the impression that Pearl is more dysfunctional or obsessive than she really is. Some aspects of the story may be predictable, but there are also surprises in the journey to a rather satisfying ending.

Miller's protagonists are much more than one-dimensional and reward the reader's time investment with their emotional development. Pearl's younger brother Benjamin provides some much-needed light relief with his comments and insults during the tenser moments (eg Jeanie's nasty outburst over the diaries): "Pointing at the page, Benjy said, 'Doesn't this line say, "wow my second wife is such a cow"?'", while Francis is responsible for quite a few, but not all, eyes-welling-up-lump-in-the-throat moments. Funny, moving and uplifting. This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Bookouture