Review: London, With Love

London, With Love by Sarra Manning
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book starts in 1986 and covers a twenty year on-off friendship between Jennifer and Nick. First off, it physically pained me to tag this as historical when much of it is an anthem to my own youth.

In 1986 Jennifer starts studying for her A levels at Barnet College, after being bullied mercilessly at school by the mean girls she is determined to reinvent herself and find some friends. Nick is an impossibly good-looking, too-cool-for-school, student in her English class, full of pretension and knowing smirks. At first they cordially dislike each other, until a chance meeting at a gig, when Nick helps Jen out of a bind, creates a tentative friendship. Jen thinks she's playing it cool and no-one knows she fancies her best friend, she even manages to be friendly with the series of ethereal blondes that Nick dates, until an overheard conversation at Jen's 18th birthday party reveals that she's fooling no-one. So ends a beautiful friendship, one in which Nick and Jen knew each other better than anyone else.

Jen and Nick continue to run into each other from time-to-time, through a mutual friend, through work, through partners. Each time their dynamic changes: he's in love with her, but she isn't; he's engaged; she's engaged; and so on. In the background we see so many of the major events that punctuate their lives: the death of Princess Diana; Y2K, 9-11 and so on.

It's interesting, initially I engaged whole-heartedly with Jen. She reminded me of my teenage years, of reinventing myself at A level college, the drinking and smoking and watching bands at Brixton Academy. Then I started to get irritated when she aged but didn't grow up (conveniently forgetting my own misspent twenties), but loved the slow way in which she gradually grew up. On the other hand, I didn't think Nick quite worked as a character, maybe because everything was focused on Jen, sometimes his motivation was a bit cloudy.

Overall, this novel brought back so many memories: of music, fashion, growing up, and seminal events in history. It was a real trip down Memory Lane, and for those too young to remember back to the 1980s I can assure you that it has that ring of authenticity. I loved how Jen/Jennifer grew emotionally, this is just as much women's fiction as it is romance. It is also an homage to a beautiful city of contradictions.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews