Sally Hepworth’s books have a way of grabbing your attention right from the time you pick them up until you turn the very last page. Her latest, The Younger Wife, did exactly that for me. It’s a domestic suspense novel about a very unconventional family that is extremely dysfunctional. The father is a well respected doctor. The mother, who is being divorced, is suffering from dementia. There’s 2 daughters who have issues of their own and then there’s the younger wife-to-be, who was their interior designer. What a hot mess! The story is mainly based around whether the father is an abusive man or not. I have to admit, the ending really left me wondering. I think the author wanted you to come to your own conclusion or belief. It was a little different but a story I really enjoyed and would recommend. I’d like to thank St. Martin’s Press for accepting my request and NetGalley for the arc to read, review and enjoy. I feel you can never go wrong reading a Sally Hepworth book, she’s always got a story that will keep you entertained. I’m giving this a 4 star rating!

It took me a while to find time to read this one because of work, but I finally had some free time this week so was able to finish the last 80% in two sittings.

I really enjoyed 99% of the book, but I feel very strongly that it was wrong to end a book about a gaslighting abusive husband with questions about whether he really was. I would have also expected there to be a section at the end with hotline numbers or websites for people to refer to if they or someone they know is being abused.

This is one of my favorite authors - The Mother In Law and The Good Sister are two of my favorite books of the past few years. I’m afraid the ending of this one will preclude me from saying the same thing about this one. Still giving it 4 stars because I liked the rest of the book.

First, I would like to thank Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press for being able to read this book early.

I was really excited to read this book since I enjoyed the The Good Sister. So, the Aston family has a lot going on. You begin to see that clearly as you keep reading. Tully and her husband are currently dealing with a bad investment that is causing them to lose their home. Rachel (Tully’s sister) hasn’t dated anyone since she was 16. Stephen (their father), is about to get married to a woman named Heather, however, he is still married to Tully and Rachel’s mother, Pam. Heather, is younger then Stephen’s daughters and has a secret past. Everyone in this family has secrets and of course their father falling in love with another woman is a problem for Tully and Rachel.

The one thing I loved about this book, was reading and learning about the characters. Hepworth really knows how to write a good book that makes you want to keep reading and not put the book down.

I was more of a fan of the writing than the story. I enjoyed the story up until the end. The ending, for me, was very underwhelming and not what I was expecting from a book labeled as a “thriller”. However, the mystery is still there.

I’ve enjoyed every Sally Hepworth book I’ve read and this was no exception. I enjoyed the developing characters of Tully and Rachel and their unraveling stories. I’m still unsure about Stephens character even after finishing the book, I’m not sure what’s true or not. I think that may be the point of this book, for one to trust their instincts/gut. Overall a great, fast, expected read from this author!

I have been a die hard Sally Hepworth fan since her first book, The Secret of Midwives was first released.

Hepworth knows how to grab this reader's attention. That opening chapter had me itching to read more and unravel what was going on. With alternating POV it shows a family with lots of secrets. Though I couldn't really connect with these women I did get to know them. There were twists and turns, numerous times I thought I knew what was going on only to be foiled again.

I wouldn't call this a thrilled but rather a domestic drama. Women with issues and to be honest I get the root of these issues for 2 of them but not the other - maybe I missed something important but I don't think so.

The Younger Wife is a story of relationships, tons of gaslighting and over coming. I don't expect my books to have a happy ending all the time but I do like a solid conclusion that leaves me feeling satisfied and unfortunately this one didn't. In fact I would have giving this book 4 stars and maybe even more but I feel cheated and let down (for so many reasons that I can't go into).

Australian author Sally Hepworth will continue to be a go to author for me. I did love the acknowledgements and the seeds that planted this book.

My thanks to St. Martin's Press (via Netgalley) for an advanced digital copy in exchange for a honest review.

Thank you to the author & publisher for gifting me a physical ARC & ebook (thanks to NetGalley as well)
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Sally Hepworth is for sure my top fav authors! Where her previous book, The Good Sister, introduced a character on the spectrum of autism with flair, this book deals with the myriad forms of abuse with panache.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗪𝗶𝗳𝗲 novel opens with something terrible happening on the wedding day of Stephen, the doctor and patriarch of the family in this book, and Heather, the much younger wife. We are then transported back to the family dynamics of Stephen’s 2 daughters, Tully & Rachel, as well as their mother, Pamela, who has Alzheimer’s. As you would expect, each character grapples with secrets or issues that the others aren’t aware of. To make matters worse, Rachel and Tully have a very hard time adjusting with the fact that their dear father is going to marry a woman of their age, when Pamela is still actively involved in everyone’s lives, and can’t really consent to this marriage. The chapters are divided into Rachel’s, Tully’s and Heather’s POVs, finally leading back to the wedding day when the unspeakable event happens.

Now here’s where the book may seem controversial or even polarizing to some. The ending. I don’t want to give away too much about that ending that would spoil your reading. I will just say that the ending made perfect sense to me (but I expect some to disagree with me) and that the author wants the reader to think deeply on the moral dilemma of that ending, and the topic of abuse which is very relevant to our times. Now my lips are sealed.

I buddy read this book with @bookybethw & other thriller besties, and we had a great time analyzing that ending, and the story overall. This book makes an excellent buddy read book, and is one of the best domestic suspense stories I’ve read. 5⭐️!

I enjoyed this story. I felt it was an easy light read even though there were a lot of heavy topics in the story. Sally Hepworth does a great job writing about mental health issues in her characters. The three main characters in the book were battling their own demons and it wasn't a story of the "wicked stepmother". This book and The Good Sister are 2 of my most favorite books that I have read in 2021..

The only thing I didn't like and I find a lot of author's doing this in their newest book is adding something about COVID-19. I find it annoying and unnecessary to have it added into storylines. Reading is an escape and bringing up COVID-19 as we are still in the pandemic ruins that escape.

⭐️⭐️ Problematic. We can do better.

We are introduced to the Aston family on the day that patriarch, Stephen, is marrying Heather, his much younger bride-to-be. Aston daughters Rachel and Tully aren’t too happy about this, particularly because their mother is suffering from dementia and Stephen divorced her even though they had enjoyed a seemingly loving and happy marriage. During the ceremony, tragedy strikes. But who is hurt, and who is to blame?

I was hoping that this domestic thriller would be a great palate cleanser after consuming some heavier material. I try to pick books that I think I will like and I take no pleasure in writing negative reviews. Unfortunately, all it did was leave a sour taste in my mouth.

I almost never include *SPOILERS* in my reviews, but in this case it is necessary to explain my issues with the book.

The main issue with this novel is the ending. It suggests that a woman who has suffered past trauma may be incapable of distinguishing between reality and her imagination. Suggesting that a victim of past abuse might be so damaged and so “crazy” (the book’s term) that she would hallucinate future abuse and no longer be able to trust her own judgement or perception is beyond insulting. Here, all three female characters are portrayed as unstable and second guess themselves about whether or not a close male family member is abusing them or not. The fact that the reader is left wondering whether there was actually abuse or whether the ladies were overreacting at best or delusional at worst is not a “fun” plot twist. Rather, it flies in the face of the me too movement and everything we have been working towards since then in terms of believing women and empowering them to speak out. And not only is the ending problematic, I just didn’t buy it. There were so many red flags flying above this guy that I couldn’t see straight.

This book wants to be like Colleen Hoover’s Verity but it’s a far cry from it. You can pick a better book than this to support. Trigger warnings for physical abuse, assault, rape, kleptomania, and dementia.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for an advance copy in exchange for my honest review. This book is scheduled to be published on April 5, 2022.

This review will be published on November 19, 2021 on Instagram and Goodreads. @sanfranliterarygal

I loathed and loved the ending. Bravo Hepworth - creative and bold move. Can’t say I saw it coming which I found refreshing and frustrating. Heavy topics dealt with but boy the ending was something else. Hepworth definitely pulled a fast one, again BRAVO, I’m still shaking my head in disbelief.

Something Happens at the wedding of an older man and a younger woman, attended by the man’s adult daughters and his dementia-suffering ex-wife.

We go back in time and see the run up to the wedding through the eyes of the two daughters, Tully and Rachel as well as Heather the bride. All three women have their secret traumas which they deal with in different ways. Tully shoplifts, Rachel bakes and eats her feelings, and Heather has spent years disguising her working class origins.

Pam, the ex-wife, also has a secret: she has filled a hotwater bottle with nearly $100,000 in cash and two names: Tully and the mysterious Fiona Arthur. When Rachel discovers this, she sets about sleuthing to find out who Fiona is and why her mother hoarded all that cash.

While the novel is certainly intriguing, I found it difficult to understand the tone and I wondered if that's because it’s Australian. It felt like it was maybe meant to be comic, though it wasn’t really funny. The traumas of the women are taken seriously but seem to be rather simplistically explained and solved. Stephen, the patriarch, is the catalyst of the mystery and is something of a blank sheet, deliberately I think, because he is interpreted by the women through their own lenses. I liked that the resolution was ambiguous but it also made me cringe a bit.

Overall, an ok book and while I’d probably read other novels by Ms Hepworth, I wouldn’t seek them out.

Thanks to St Martin’s Press and Netgalley for the digital review copy.

In The Younger Wife, the narrators slowly become unreliable as secrets leak and personalities show true colors when stress rises. Each character deals with the pressure differently, expertly showing how stress dictates your mental health. Ultimately, this brain fog causes the characters to question if the events were actual or imagined. As for the mystery, the clues aren’t crystal clear, making the tale murkier - in a good way!

I'm truly a fan of Sally Hepworth's writing style. Her short chapters entice me to read “just one more” as the slow burn mystery builds. And I love her sharp-witted dialogue, which offers a chuckle in between the tense moments.

Unlike some of her previous novels, The Younger Wife’s ending is a bit ambiguous. I buddy chatted this book for #NetGalleyNovember - thanks, @bookybethw and I think we each had a different theory of the truth. I started the book chat feeling that I liked, maybe not loved, the book. But as we chatted and unraveled the theories, I truly appreciated how stress, past trauma, and family dynamics all play into our mental health. As a result, I decided to bump my rating by .25 stars.

I highly recommend this book for a book club or buddy chat! You’ll want and NEED to discuss this book! Put this on your TBR for Spring 2022!! Well done, Sally Hepworth!!

Thank you Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for this arc. I expected good writing because I have read books by Ms. Hepworth before, and I was not disappointed this time either. The characters were great, even if they weren't always likable, they had real lives and foibles. If you like getting to know the characters in a book, you will love this!
The story was really good, even if it was rather heavy-handed in trying to convince the reader of one thing (no spoilers). However, I'm not sure how I felt about the ending. even though I can't imagine what ending would have satisfied me!
The After the Wedding part was confusing and left me with more questions than answers. This would make this a great book for bookclubs, so people could discuss their theories about what it meant. If (like me) you don't have anyone to discuss it with, you might be left dissatisfied! 3.5 stars rounded up to 4. Definitely worth the read, but not a book I will rave about.

This was a psychological thriller that moved along at a good pace and well developed characters. Drama ensues at a wedding and the deception and confusion that pervades the family dynamics comes to an unfortunate tipping point. The author does not shy away from topics that are traumatic and hard to write about such as rape, abuse, PTSD, intimidation, and gaslighting. I loved that I didn't have the end figured out and was pleasantly surprised. Sally Hepworth has another best seller with this psychological thriller. I recommend this novel for those who love messy family dynamics and surprise endings.

Sally Hepworth brings us yet another domestic suspense story filled with lots of family drama and twists and turns throughout the book. This book will keep you glued to the edge of your seat guessing right up until the end. Sally Hepworth has a knack for developing sophisticated characters and plots that unfold sooo beautifully one detail at a time until all the pieces of the story fall into place. A real page turner to be devoured and not to be missed!
Many thanks to Netgalley and St Martin's Publishing Group for providing me an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my review.

This was alright. It just wasn’t my cup of tea as I did not really love the family drama aspect. This will appeal to fans of the authors previous work. I think people will enjoy this because it is full of drama.

4.5 dramatic stars

This is my sixth Sally Hepworth book, and she continues to wow me with her domestic drama. Her characters are so well developed and seem like real people with realistic flaws!

In this tale, we have two sisters – Tully and Rachel – and their father. He’s about to get married again to a (you guessed it!) younger wife. Tully and Rachel’s mother is currently in a facility for dementia but still has a part to play in the story!

I really liked Rachel in this book, she is a master cake baker and seems to really have her life together. Except for the fact that she hasn’t dated anyone for 20 years.

Tully has some issues, but I loved how devoted she was to her family. Her husband’s managing of their money has led to some serious problems for them and that doesn’t help her anxiety.

Then we come to Heather, the younger woman, and I was prepared to really dislike her, going after an older man with money, classic case, right? Leave it the author to write a character that got my sympathy rather than my ire.

The book opens with things going very wrong at the wedding and then we flash back in forth in time to get the pieces of the story, building up to a very interesting conclusion. The final parts of the book caused me to question what I had just read, and my fellow readers interpreted things differently than I did!

Thank you Netgalley and St. Martin's Publishing Group for this Advanced Reader's Copy in return for an honest review.

Tully and Rachel's father announce to his daughters that he is getting remarried. Problem number one his new wife to be is younger than Tully and Rachel (his adult daughters). Problem number two, their father is still married to their mother who has dementia! As Tully and Rachel take in the news and try and find out what Heather really wants with marrying their father, other complications occur.

I was really excited to read another Sally Hepworth psychological thriller because she always does an amazing job writing about complex characters with complicated issues and this book did not disappoint. Issues such as domestic violence, binge eating, and kleptomania are to name a few in this book. I really enjoyed seeing Tully and her sister Rachel get closer in their relationship towards the end of the book. This was a page turner, Hepworth's writing was twisty and mysterious.
However, the ending was a big lackluster compared to her other novels and it wasn't a big revelation like I thought it was going to be.

Overall really enjoyed the book and seeing the character development and what was going to happen next. Also loved that the ending of the book was based off of a real incident that happened in Hepworth's life.

The Younger Wife by Sally Hepworth

I enjoyed this story very much, up to a point. The story is told from the view point of three women, sisters Tully and Rachel, and Heather, their dad's soon to be new wife. Heather is younger than the sisters and to marry Heather, their dad, Stephen, divorced his wife and the mother of his daughters. The wife, Pam, had no say in the matter because she's living in a care facility due to quickly progressing dementia.

So, yeah, Tully and Rachel are suppose to welcome new step mommy with open arms. Heather is excited to be marrying Stephen, but she's way out of her comfort zone. Everyone has issues, including little toddler Miles, Tully's son. Secrets abound and things aren't helped by utterings by Pam, which may or may not have any connection to reality.

For the first half of the story, I took a lot of things at face value, but couldn't help side eyeing how the two sisters could hide their secrets so well. How did their parents not know important matters in their daughters' lives. Each girl has some fuzzy and disturbing memories about both parents and eventually I realized we have a book-ful of unreliable narrators. What is true and what is not true?

The story had me captivated and I really looked forward to knowing what was going on. But in the end, I felt like I had entered a crazy house of mirrors and I'm supposed to pick out the truth myself? I'm not good at such open, pick your own truth kind of non resolutions and that's where I ended up being disappointed in the story. It's fun to wonder and guess and suspect but I don't consider if fun to never find out if my suspicions are correct. Still the journey to get to the end of the story was very engrossing, I just wish I knew where I was at the end.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for this ARC.

Stephen and Pam have been happily married for decades and have two adult daughters, Tully and Rachel. But when Pam ends up suffering from dementia so severe she has to be moved to assisted living, Stephen quickly moves along to a relationship with his interior decorator Heather, a woman younger than either of his daughters. The book follows the three women as they navigate the tenuous relationship they’ve been thrown into while each also deals with their own personal issues. By the time Stephen heads to the chapel to wed Heather, each is questioning their realities and assumptions, and someone will end up being taken out of the church on a stretcher…

Based on the title, I assumed this was going to have a much stronger focus on drama between the daughters and the new wife and was pleasantly surprised it didn’t. I ended up reading this in one sitting and could not put it down. This is going to generate lively, maybe even heated, discussion in book clubs, let me tell you...

This is a well-paced domestic drama with complex, generally relatable characters and a whole lot going on. Perhaps too much. Every single character was going through some kind of major issue, and while Hepworth slid between perspectives with ease and made each woman feel very real, I can’t help but come away feeling like not enough time could be given to any one issue or woman because all three were going through so much. Rachel, in my opinion, was particularly shortchanged. I also wish I could have known more of Heather’s backstory, especially about her previous romantic relationships.

The Younger Wife is my second book by Hepworth, and in both I’ve noticed the romantic plotlines involve an all but perfect man who says and does all of the right things and accepts the woman no matter her flaws and quirks, with no questioning or hesitation. In the first book, I was willing to just go with it, but here it bothered me. Rachel’s arc either deserved far, FAR more care and attention, or it should have been left out entirely. The “easy” resolution would have been insulting regardless, but coupled with a problematic overall ending to the book, it feels extra uncomfortable.

(One could also make the argument that there is a second unrealistically understanding man in the book, depending on how one views certain events…)

This is a really hard one for me to rate. On the one hand, if you divorce (ha ha ha) the subject matter and messaging from the plot, this is very clever. I love the idea of casting doubt, creating ambiguity, and making the reader question everything they think they know, but I think this subject was shaky and loaded ground to do it on. I do think readers will be split on whether or not a certain someone is guilty, and I’ve already had a really great discussion with a GR friend about it. I just find it extremely difficult to slap a high rating on something I feel like a men’s rights activist could hold proudly in the air as an example of hysterical women and their “false” accusations hurting men. (As a note for those who don’t regularly read my reviews, I am just as quick to call out misandry)

I’m settling on 3 stars because honestly I really liked this one. Until I really, REALLY didn’t.

Sally Hepworth is a MASTER of DOMESTIC SUSPENSE/FAMILY DYNAMICS!

In the opening scene we find ourselves at a wedding, which is being described by an unnamed narrator, who confesses that she is a woman of a certain age, watching the man who still takes her breath away, marry a woman young enough to be his daughter.

Our narrator is shocked to also see Pamela in attendance. Married to Stephen Aston for 34 years, Pamela was divorced By Stephen, when she got dementia and was moved to a care facility, allowing him to marry again.

What a guy!

She is even more shocked when Pamela makes her way to the alter during the ceremony picking up a candlestick when she reaches the groom. There is a scream, a thud, and someone ends up covered in blood.

But, who?

REWIND to one year earlier…when Stephen’s daughters, Tully and Rachel, are meeting their Dad’s new girlfriend, Heather, at a luncheon, for the first time.

From this point on, the story will unfold from the alternating perspectives of these three young women-yes, the “bride to be” gets her say, as well as Stephen’s two daughters.

Is it love??

Each woman has their secrets-some from the past and others in the present, and we get to hear them all, in this FAST PACED, UNPUTDOWNABLE drama, until the past catches up to the present, and we are back at the scene of the crime/wedding.

The last 7% is where this book gets controversial. I read it with friends and we were divided on what we think the last chapters implied. No spoilers here-but how YOU interpret it-will determine how you feel about the ending. If you view it one way-you might be angry-if you view it the other way-as I did-you will be thinking-how CLEVER!