Review: One Night With You

One Night With You by Laura Jane Williams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After her love affair with lying, cheating, Abe crashes and burns, Ruby decides to concentrate on herself for a change, she plans to leave her flatshare in London and has enrolled on a one-year documentary film-making course at Manchester University.

Nic has just split up from his childhood sweetheart, Millie, disappointing her and their families. He's too timid to go after anything he wants but has decided to move from Liverpool to London, spend some time with his little brother Ollie and reinvent himself (hopefully).

Nic and Ruby meet when he comes to buy her velvet sofa, sparks fly but how can either of them give up their dreams and plans for a one-night stand? But fate has a funny way of getting her own way, so when Ruby's former flatmate takes Nic under his wing it seems the two of them are moving in the same circles, or at least adjacent circles more than either of them had expected.

Fair warning, I have been on a real book downer for a few weeks but this just didn't do it for me. There seemed to be all sorts of plots swirling around, like Ruby's documentary about a WW2 veteran who has never forgotten the French girl he fell in love with all those decades ago and now wants to find her before he dies, or the falling-out with Ruby's ex-flatmate which get inflated into a BIG DEAL and then fizzle out. Also there are two big things that happen near the end of the novel which (to me) just scream that the author didn't know where to take the book next, and yet again they sort of fizzled into nothing. My overall feeling was that this was a very long novel about a woman who makes a couple of very strong life-choices and then forces herself to stick by them come-hell-or-high-water, for no good reason.

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

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