The No-Show

"This is sad in places, and joyful in other places, and funny as well. Beth O’Leary is the author of The Flatshare . That was her breakout book, which I absolutely adored. It was a romance told largely in Post-it notes, as the two main characters spend most of the book not meeting. The not-meeting element is continued in this book, which is set on Valentine’s Day. The No-Show is told through the voices of three protagonists. The first character is a woman called Siobhan, who is meant to be meeting a man for breakfast and he doesn’t show up. Siobhan’s a life coach. She’s got her act together; she’s very smart; she takes no nonsense from anybody. You’re following her story with this man, with whom she has been having an on-off, more than a fling but not really a relationship, but she’s falling for him and doesn’t like that loss of control. You then go to the lunchtime date with a woman called Miranda, who’s got a quite unusual job. She’s a tree surgeon, so she’s a very outdoorsy girl. She has been dating the same man. She has a lunch date with him and he doesn’t show up. The third character is a woman called Jane. She’s got some secret in her past that has caused her to run away from her life and go and work somewhere far away in a charity shop. You get the impression that there’s a whole history that hasn’t yet been revealed. She has bumped into the same man. He was meant to be her plus one at an engagement dinner and he doesn’t turn up. The book follows their three stories, and they each then meet the guy that has failed to show up on that day. You’re following the three romances, and the whole time you’re thinking, ‘This is all going to go cataclysmically wrong! It’s going to implode! Their paths are going to cross! He’s going to get himself caught out because he’s got three really nice main characters, and he seems to be doing the dirty!’ But he also seems like a nice guy who’s looking after his mother with Alzheimer’s. There are lots of interesting threads running through the book and it has a phenomenal twist. I can’t tell you because it would ruin it for anybody who reads it, but it is incredibly cleverly done. I’m quite good at spotting twists in this particular genre. You think, ‘Oh, I bet I know what’s going to happen next!’ I didn’t spot this one coming. I read it through again before we had this chat because I wanted to refresh just why I’d picked it. Even though I knew the twist was coming, it still got me!"