The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne by Freya North

About the book

When your present meets your past, what do you take with you – and what do you leave behind?

Eadie Browne is an odd child with unusual parents, living in a strange house neighbouring the local cemetery. Bullied at school – but protected by her two best friends, Celeste and Josh, and her many imaginary friends lying six feet under next door – Eadie muddles her way through.

Arriving in Manchester as a student in the late 1980s, Eadie confronts a busy, gritty Victorian metropolis a far cry from the small Garden City she’s left behind. Soon enough she experiences a novel freedom she never imagined and it’s seductive. She can be who she wants to be, do as she pleases, and no one back home needs to know. As Manchester embraces the dizzying, colourful euphoria of Rave counterculture, Eadie is swept along, blithely ignoring danger and reality. Until, one night, her past comes hurtling at her with ramifications which will continue into her adult life.

Now, as the new millennium beckons, Eadie is turning thirty with a marriage in tatters. She must travel back to where she once lived for a funeral she can’t quite comprehend. As she journeys from the North to the South, from the present to the past, Eadie contemplates all that was then – and all that is now – in this moving love letter to youth.

What I thought

I honestly don’t know where to start with this review. I don’t think I could ever put into words how much I enjoyed reading Eadie’s story. I lived and breathed this book from the first page to the last and was very sad to reach the end. It certainly left me with one hell of a book hangover.

This is Freya North’s 16th novel. I haven’t read any of her other books. Of those who have, reviewers have said how very different this book is to the others. It is beautifully written and I’m guessing, because that’s how it felt, that it has been written very much from the heart. As it says in the book description “a love letter to youth”.

It is almost a time-slip novel in that small parts are set in Eadie’s present, in 1999. A 30 year old woman on a long drive from North to South to attend a funeral with her husband. We don’t know whose funeral but from the snippets of conversation between Eadie and her husband we can gather that perhaps all is not well between the the two.

As they continue on their long journey, the majority of the book is Eadie looking back on her life so far starting with primary school and the school bully. Written in the first person Eadie is as authentic in her narrative as a 7 year old, as she is later on in the book as an 18/19 year old. It is like watching someone grow through childhood, teenage years, young adult to a young woman speeded up in the space of the week it took me to read it.

There are so many wonderful supporting characters. Her friends through school, her parents the ‘centrists’ 😉, the friends she made at Uni all play a huge part in this story. And Manchester itself in the late 80’s. For anyone who was at Manchester University at this time, this book will be such a nostalgic journey with time and place so evocatively brought to life again.

This book is nostalgic, funny, moving, warm hearted and just a beautiful story that had me absolutely captivated.