What I’m reading ... Mandy Myles

You become so utterly engrossed with the characters ... you start to think of them as friends

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason has left me with a hangover — and no, not the Sunday morning kind but the kind that only a truly magnificent story can leave you with. The kind where you become so utterly engrossed with the characters they become real people and you start to think of them as friends. (I’m not the only one who does this, right?)

This novel starts with Martha, the narrator, having just left the 40th birthday party that she never wanted, organised by her husband Patrick. We are immediately thrown into a relationship in turmoil, with no answers as to why. After setting the scene, Martha takes us back through time and we follow their story from meeting as family friends in their teens, to falling in love and all that is in between, including Martha’s desire to never have children.

Sorrow and Bliss is about relationships, love, motherhood, mental health and, ultimately, what makes us human. Mason’s ability to pinpoint the most relatable of human traits and turn them into a dry, satirical joke is, in my opinion, the defining point of this novel.

In one of the most relatable quotes of the book, Martha relays what was once a charming gag but has now become the couple’s biggest downfall. “It used to be a joke between us, that in everything I swing between extremes and he lives his entire life on the middle setting.”

It was immediately apparent that I would not be able to put this book down until I finished it, gobbling the whole story in just two days. It is unsurprising that the film and television rights have already been sold and that this book has been longlisted in the fiction category for the prestigious Ockham Book Awards.