Thoroughly enjoyed this book. I really felt for Maggie and really struggled to like her husband Sean. I can not imagine what it must feel like to lose a child but the author done a great job with the character Maggie. The highs and lows of Maggie's recovery from the coma, and trying to find out what happened. This book is a real page turner and definitely a book to read in one sitting on the beach.

The Day of the Accident is an emotional read made more interesting by the main character’s loss of memory as the story started. This added to the drama and injected an element of suspicion surrounding the accident.

I liked how the story developed slowly as Margaret starts to remember and piece together how events could have happened. I recommend the book and the author.

Wow what a great novel didn't expect it to play out like it did a mother's tragic story of losing a child in tragic circumstances which leads her phycological and mental health problems overwhelming and as the truth about her past finally come back to her the story is spine chilling a real page turner which I couldn't put down a 5 🌟 read and then some a must read

A mystery thriller with many twists.

The nightmare for Maggie begins when she wakes from a coma to be told that she nearly drowned trying to save her young daughter Elspeth who was locked in a car that rolled into the river. This is not all; her husband Sean has now disappeared, the money has been cleared from their bank account and their house has been sold.

This harrowing story traces Maggie’s efforts to piece together what happened on the day of the accident. Her task is made frustratingly difficult by the fact that she has no memory of that day and only glimpses of memory from her past. She is aware that something dreadful happened when she was a teenager and her doctor knows she had severe mental problems at that time. There are so many questions that need answering. Did the event of the past have a bearing on this terrible accident? Was it her fault that her daughter died? Where is her husband and why has he left her with nothing? Slowly, with the help of a few friends, she starts to piece together what actually happened but her nightmare is made worse when a letter from her daughter is delivered to her and then one of her daughter’s little cardigans is left on the doorstep. Although everyone tells her Elspeth is dead she becomes convinced her daughter must still be alive.

There are tension and suspense right to the end and the dialogue is well written but I did find the final chapters rather implausible and feel this was a clever idea that became a little far-fetched.

A good read with plenty of surprises.

Jane

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

This book was reported to be ‘twisty’, ‘compelling’, ‘gripping’, and rivalling The Girl On The Train. These are all descriptors that make me want to jump into reading a book, as those are all the traits I look for in a psychological thriller.

Maggie wakes up from a coma, to find that there has been an accident in which her daughter has died, and she is told that she is the one to blame. Maggie has no recollection of the accident, and on leaving hospital finds that everything she had in life is now gone, and she is left alone following her husband’s disappearance and his selling their marital home.

The book started off relatively slow, therefore taking me quite a few sittings to actually start to enjoy reading it, and I must admit I nearly gave up on it. Things started to improve about a third of the way in, and left me questioning who could be trusted and what the hell was going on. So far, a reasonable enough read but certainly not ‘compelling’ or ‘gripping’. As the truth started to unfold however and Maggie started to find out about the accident that put her into the coma, the plot started to get a little more juicy. I held my hopes out for an explosive ending, but I’m sad to say that it all became pretty far-fetched and felt a little ridiculous to read. It almost felt as though the author had considered the plot and the bulking out of the characters and locations etc, but hadn’t considered how it would all end, therefore throwing something completely random into the mix. On the plus side, I did enjoy Ellwood’s writing style.

Fantastic. A book that starts in the heart of the story and never let's up. A real warmth for the character developed throughout as we discovered what really happened on that night alongside her.

The Day of The Accident by Nuala Elwood was my 15th book of 2018. The story starts with Maggie in court and then slips back to what brought her to be there. Maggie wakes in hospital to find out that she had been involved in an accident, her precious daughter Elspeth drowned in the accident and her husband has disappeared whilst Maggie was in a coma in hospital. Maggie doesn’t remember any of this.

Maggie is a very complex, troubled character who you get to know well quite quickly. Maggie has so many questions, but I found her questions were also questions I was asking also;

Is her daughter actually dead ?(the conspiracist in me)
Where is Sean?
What happened at the accident?
Who is Freya?
What is the bad thing?
Who is writing the letters?

In was a cleverly constructed well written plot and I did work out the answers to most of the questions myself well before the end but that didn’t matter. I sped through this book in know time, it was an easy read with a quick pace which meant you sailed through the book and were at the end before you knew it. It draws on your emotions and it did make me think where your mind must need to go to be able to write this dark tale.

Nuala is a new author and will be one that I look out for new books in the future, I received this book from Net Galley and Penguin Books UK in exchange for an honest review.I give this book 5/5.

I would like to thank Penguin Books UK and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read ‘The Day Of The Accident written by Nuala Ellwood, in exchange for my honest and unbiased review.
Maggie is in hospital in a coma following the car accident in which her beloved ten-year-old daughter Elspeth drowns. When she awakes ten weeks later she discovers that her husband Sean has disappeared after giving notice to their landlord, resigning his job and taking all their money from the bank account. As she recovers Maggie starts getting flashes of the past but is still unable to remember anything about the car accident, why she locked Elspeth inside the car and left it parked on the river bank without the brake fully on. Maggie believes that Elspeth is still alive as she’s positive she sees her, and despite her fragile state goes searching for clues of Sean’s whereabouts hoping he can tell her what happened.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading ‘The Day Of The Accident’, a dark psychological thriller which has been well-written with a gripping plot and interesting characters. The way in which letters signed ‘your lovely daughter’ are inserted throughout the story gives it depth and add greatly to the suspense. As I got further into the story the tension mounted until the final twist which was both disturbing and harrowing. This is a novel not to be missed and one I can thorough recommend.

What a great book. Full of twists and turns and unexpected events. It tells the story of Maggie, who wakes from a coma to discover that her beloved daughter Elspeth is dead, and her husband Sean has left her. The plot is fast paced with a surprise ending. A must read.

I read this quickly, but can't say I enjoyed it.

Maggie wakes from a coma, still very much recovering physically and mentally, to find out that her daughter is dead - drowned in a car Maggie was driving - and her husband has left her.

Her memory of the event is almost non-existent. She has no family whatsoever to help her put things back together. Not even belongings - it seems her husband sold their house from under her. The social workers try and help but...

This is where it gets frustrating. Whenever you have a main character with memory issues in a book, there's a fine balance to be found between keeping the reader turning the pages and frustrating them because they know the answer is being manipulated out of the way. It irritated me that Maggie's life was so empty that she didn't have a single person who knew her to help - even though I know there are people like this. Her life just felt conveniently empty and that's what created the mystery - because there wasn't much too the real one.

I wasn't keen on the tagline on the cover that I saw - 'They say you killed her... but what if they're wrong'.

There's only one person in the entire book who thinks Maggie actually killed her daughter. Maybe two. The police aren't remotely interested. There's no 'finding out who really did it'. The missing husband element is surprisingly throwaway (and I didn't believe he could be so callous). I suppose I felt a bit misled. The mother/daughter letters scattered through the book didn't help with this.

I think some readers will find The Day of the Accident an interesting psychological insight into a woman who's hit rock bottom. Personally, I felt a little too manipulated to enjoy it fully.

♥I got an ARC from the publisher through NetGalley and this is my honest uninfluenced review♥

Rating: 6 of 7; 5 of 5; 9 of 10

General view: What on earth was this book? I could never guess like anything that happened. There're so many things I wanna say but everything would be so spoiler.

Positives: amazing writing. page-turner. deep complex plot. flawless execution. unstoppable. so many emotions!

Ending: I can honestly say that I didn't guess even a little detail. Major plot twist. Things I could never even dream.

Downsides: i will have to say none. I could just not talk about downsides but honestly, I loved this book so much I need to make clear there's nothing I wanna complain about

Side note: I stopped reading at 29% and then I came back days later because I wasn't in a good place. I was having problems reading literally anything. But I know deep in my heart that if I was my usual self this book wouldn't have least 5 hours. This was that good. Unstoppable. On a more important side note, I finished the book ages ago, but husband was home these days and also, c'mom, World Cup dude!

This is a very pacey and well-constructed book which I could hardly bring myself to put down. Some of the characterisation is a little weak but other than that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought I knew what had happened and how the plot would unfold but the author had me fooled. The publication date seems quite a way off and I fully expect by then that this book will be massively talked about and anticipated.

I loved this book! It was an excellent thriller with twist after twist to keep you guessing. And even though I guessed the big twist it was still enjoyable.

Just finished reading this book and read it in two days it was that compelling a read. Maggie wakes up from a coma to find her daughter had drowned locked in the car that she had driven. She had tried to help her but couldn't and had swallowed water that had damaged her lungs. She doesn't know why she had driven to the pub or why she had locked her daughter in the car. To make it worse her husband Sean just disappears after emptying their account and leaving her with nothing. With help from others she tries to get her life back on track but when she receives items from her dead child she believes that she is still alive somewhere. People from her past come back into her life with devasting consequences and what happens at the end is a shock. I just loved this book and would read others from this author.

I really enjoyed reading Nuala Ellwood’s debut novel My Sister’s Bones so I was excited to be given the chance to read her second novel The Day of the Accident. Whilst I didn’t find the story as gripping as her first book it still makes for a compelling page turner and once again Nuala weaves a twisty tale centred on grief, loss and human relationships.

In the opening chapters of the novel we meet Maggie who is waking from a coma. Maggie was recently involved in a horrific accident along with her daughter, Elspeth. As she begins to heal the true horrors of that night are revealed to her and now she must begin to start a new life, but how can she when she has so many unanswered questions about what really happened? Will she ever get to the truth?

I had a lot of empathy for Maggie in this book. Nuala writes her character so well and I found the grief that Maggie was experiencing to be very believable. There is always a sense of urgency as Maggie fights hard to find the answers as to what happened on the day of the accident, and although I felt the truth maybe too horrifying for her, I was rooting for her to get to the bottom of what happened.

When I read Nuala’s first book I was really impressed by the twists so I was really looking forward to seeing how she would twist the plot in her second book and Nuala did it again. Her plotting is superb. Both her books have had really satisfying conclusions and it did make me think, how did I not see that twist coming? She is a writer who I am certainly a huge fan of and I’m really looking forward to reading what she comes up with next.

If you’re after a twisty, character driven psychological thriller, then you need to read Nuala Ellwood. Thank you to the publisher and to Netgalley for the advance review copy.

I wasn't sure if I was going to like it when I started to read it, but what a fantastic book that not only gripped me but also kept me guessing to the end. Nuala Ellwood is an extremely talented author and I will definitely be checking out the her other books. Would give it more than 5 stars if I could.

I enjoyed this book and it kept me guessing right from the beginning. It was an interesting structure for a couple of reasons. Starting with the trial was one goods strategy and also the fact that we were constantly having to work out who was writing the letters. This was very thought provoking and meant I was having to try and work out things as the book progressed, so I felt that I was interacting all the time. There was a part in the middle where I felt it became a bit tedious, which is why I only gave four stars, but it picked up as it got nearer to the end and I couldn't put it down. All in all a good read.

I have just finished reading The Day of the Accident which I received via Netgalley.

This is a very, very dark book full of emotions that play with your brain. Whilst Maggie is in a catastrophic and tragic situation with which I could easily empathise I never really actually liked her.

The plot is full of suspense but whilst it plays out it never gives much away in terms of clues and what we are left with at it's conclusion is a bunch of people whose lives have been badly damaged, indeed only Sonia seems to come out of it unscathed, and it is the truth about the damage that comes out in the end with maybe just the tiniest hint of happy ever afters.

I think it would be shallow to say I liked or enjoyed this book but I did want to keep reading it and I can admire the writing style as it was indeed extremely clever, but for my taste and sensibilities it was just too dark.

This was a very interesting and different read with Maggie, the central character, recovering from a dreadful incident where she lost her young daughter. Maggie is eventually released from hospital in a very fragile state facing dreadful circumstances, abandoned by her husband, no home or income and the loss of Elspeth, in an accident that she believes she caused. I am finding that a lot of psychological thrillers these days have characters who have no parents, always seem to be killed early on in a car accident, and no immediate family or close friends, which makes their situation all the more difficult. I feel that in so many of these books, the inclusion of parents, close friends, siblings etc would mean that the storyline just wouldn't work. The hero, or much more often, heroine, feels isolated which supposedly adds to their plight. Maggie is no exception to this. So we are introduced to regular letters from a young girl who has apparently been abandoned herself by her parents and sent to a cruel and horrific boarding school. I think you are meant to think into the possibility that the letters are from Elspeth and perhaps she wasn't dead after all, maybe whisked away by her father. I then wondered if Maggie herself had written them when she was a child but after that I just wasn't sure. Maggie seems to spend a lot of time crying but maybe I would in the same situation. Finally everything ties up and we are made aware of the terrible thing that Maggie did when she was young, a secret that could not be told. To be honest I would have liked a happier ending, it was all quite depressing without a break, maybe there was a glimmer of something eventually. It was a good read but maybe not a book I would remember.

Margaret Allan, (Maggie) enters a plea to a crime of manslaughter. The story then begins with Maggie waking up from a coma, which she has been in for six weeks since the day of the accident.

She is told that her daughter, Elspeth, was killed in the accident and her husband has since disappeared. She also discovers that her husband sold their family home some years back and they have been renting it ever since. He gave notice to the company after their daughter had been buried and as a result Maggie has nowhere to live. Devastated, she tries to recall what happened the night her car went into the river with her daughter locked inside.

Struggling with memory loss Maggie begins to recall snippets of what happene that night. Gradually the reader is fed more snippets from Maggies past, providing a twisty, turny read.

Weaved throughout the novel there are heart wrenching letters from a child to her mother which plead for her mother to collect her and take her home. Get your tissues out -it's teary reading and very well done.

Thank you to NetGalley, Penguin Books UK and Nuala Ellwood for my advance copy. I read Elwood's first novel which was very different to this one but I do like the writing style and I flew through it. It would be a great holiday read.

I would highly recommend this book for fans of the psychological thriller genre.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my advance copy.