NEW RELEASE
To My Best Friends - Sam Baker (2011)
Fashionista Nicci is dying of cancer, and writes her three best friends a letter, each bequeathing them something precious of hers. To her business partner Jo, she asks that she care for her twin daughters. To single Mona, she leaves her husband David and to Lizzie, whose husband Nicci never approved of, she leaves her garden. The three friends are all surprised by Nicci's requests - Jo is trying to have a baby of her own and already has stepchildren; Mona is secretly seeing a married man and has never been interested in David; and Lizzie hardly has a green thumb and is already tied up with visiting her ailing mother. As the friends meet up to sort through Nicci's extensive wardrobe, her requests start to have effect on their lives in unexpected ways. This will suit if you're looking for a heart-warming novel about friendship and moving on after loss. But it was a bit too slow moving and then wrapped up too nicely for me.
Red editor-in-chief Sam Baker's To My Best Friends sees a woman leave some questionable legacies for her friends. The summary says: "Nicci Morrison was always the first of her friends to do everything ... But she wasn't meant to be the first to die. Nicci has one last chance to make a difference before she leaves - by leaving letters bequeathing her most treasured possessions to her closest girl friends. To Mona - single and searching - she bequeaths her husband David, little knowing her best friend found The One a long time ago, it's just that Neil is married. To childless Jo O'Hara, Nicci leaves the care of her three-year-old twin daughters. Jo however, far from longing for children, is finding it hard to cope with the fortnightly arrival of her husband's two sons. To Lizzie Freidman, her flatmate from college, she leaves her garden. But while Lizzie is loyally tending Nicci's plants, the parts of her own life that are in desperate need of attention are falling by the wayside. In death, as in life, Nicci doesn't always know best, and she did not imagine the changes, and traumas that her letters set in motion for the loved ones she's left behind." To My Best Friends is out in May.