#BookReview | The Last Thing She Told Me | Linda Green

The Lovely Helen Pryke, Author recommended this to me a while ago and it had been sat in my tbr pile for ages. Having previously read a book by this author and being intriuged by the blurb, i couldnt wait to read it.

Blurb

Even the deepest-buried secrets can find their way to the surface…

Moments before she dies, Nicola’s grandmother Betty whispers to her that there are babies at the bottom of the garden.

Nicola’s mother claims she was talking nonsense. However, when Nicola’s daughter finds a bone while playing in Betty’s garden, it’s clear that something sinister has taken place.

But will unearthing painful family secrets end up tearing Nicola’s family apart?

Extract

My punishment came every week, same time, same place. It was like an appointment with hell in my own home. And the days in between i spent hating myself for what i’d let him do to me and dreading his arrival the following week. My life as i knew it stopped. I didn’t smile or laugh or sing anymore. I occupied this cold, hard place and the cold, hard place occupied me. People just thought it was my hormones. Said i’d become a mardy teenager. Always sullen and down in the mouth. Mum said that if i didn’t cheer up soon, my face would be stuck like that forever. She didn’t know, you see. I could hardly talk to her about it. She’d believe him, i knew she would. And it would break her heart to hear the things he’d say about me. So, i had to grin and bear it. Well, grimace and bear it, in my case. I tried to tell myself that at least things couldn’t get any worse. Until the Tuesday morning i woke up feeling sick and realised i hadn’t been in hell at all, just standing in the waiting room above, about to fall through the trapdoor into it. I knew straight away. I’d missed my period, and although i’d tried to block it out and pretend to myself that it was the strain, i think i already knew.

My Review

The Last Thing She Told Me by Linda Green

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Her grandmother’s dieing words of babies at the bottom of the garden can’t be true? Long buried secrets that threatened to destroy a whole family are unearthed. Secrets that nobody even Nicola would have thought possible. I was recommended this book by a good friend a while ago, and having read the blurb I was intrigued. What I wasn’t prepared for was the assault on my emotions. A truly harrowing account of 3 generations of women, of love, loss and the buried secrets that had to be hidden for all the right reasons. To protect those they loved. Well developed characters and a strong storyline that engages you from the first page. I would highly recommend it.



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About The Author

Linda Green is the bestselling author of nine novels, which have sold more than one million copies and been translated into 12 languages. Her latest emotional thriller, The Last Thing She Told Me, tells the story of three generations of women and the secrets they keep. 

Linda has lived in West Yorkshire for the past 18 years but was born in North London in 1970 and brought up in Hertfordshire. She wrote her first novella, the Time Machine, aged nine, but unfortunately the pony-based time travel thriller genre never took off. 

Linda joined her local newspaper, the Enfield Gazette, as a trainee reporter at eighteen. During a ten year career in regional journalism, she worked as a reporter on the Birmingham Daily News, news editor on the Birmingham Metro News and Chief Feature Writer on the Coventry Evening Telegraph, winning Highly Commended in the Feature Writer of the Year category of the 1997 Press Gazette Regional Press Awards.

By 1998 she left her staff job to write her first novel and work as a freelance journalist. She has written for The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, The Times Educational Supplement, The Big Issue, Wanderlust and Community Care Magazine. 

After more than a hundred rejections from agents (and more rewrites than she cares to remember) she finally obtained a two-book deal with Headline Review in 2006. 

Her first novel I Did a Bad Thing was published in paperback in October 2007 and made the top thirty official fiction bestsellers list. 10 Reasons Not to Fall in Love was published in paperback in March 2009 and reached no 22 in the official fiction bestseller charts. Both novels were also long-listed for the RNA Romantic Novel of the Year Award. They were followed by Things I Wish I’d Known, which was a top thirty paperback bestseller and And Then It Happened, which was a top forty bestseller in paperback and has sold more than 100,000 ebooks.

After five years with Headline she left to join Quercus in 2011. Her fifth novel The Mummyfesto, published in 2013, told the story of three women who set up a new political party and stand in the general election and was featured on Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour. Her sixth novel The Marriage Mender was published in August 2014.

Linda’s first psychological thriller, While My Eyes Were Closed was published in ebook in January 2016 and paperback in May 2016 and has gone on to sell more than 450,000 copies across all editions. Her eighth novel, After I’ve Gone, has sold more than 100,000 copies. 

Linda lives in West Yorkshire with her husband and son. 

Before having her son she enjoyed travelling and has trekked after wild orang-utans in Borneo, been to the edge of the Arctic Circle to see polar bears and as far south as Tierra del Fuego to photograph penguins. She also has a keen interest in politics and has appeared on Newsnight, Radio 5 Live, Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour and BBC News. She particularly enjoyed taking former PM David Cameron to task on Leadership Question Time in 2015.

For more info, please go to Linda’s website at http://www.linda-green.com, like @lindagreenauthor on Facebook and follow @LindaGreenisms on Twitter and linda green books on Instagram.