Imagine it: you're living in London in a flat you inherited from your grandmother. You're single, and that's basically fine. And...then you come home one night and find a husband in your flat. A husband you've never met. And when he goes up to the attic for something, a different husband comes down in his place, and the world resets—and again, and again, and again.

That's where Lauren finds herself when this book opens.

I read this for the premise, and oh gosh, it did not disappoint. We've probably all imagined how our lives might have been different if we'd made a different decision here or there, and in "The Husbands", Lauren is living it. With each man who clatters down from the attic, not just the husband shifts but also the world around her: different jobs, different friends, different hobbies; sometimes a husband is just fine but in this world her relatives have made different choices that she can't conceive of living with; sometimes she's married into money and sometimes she's deeply in debt. Some things remain basically consistent, but sometimes things are...complicated.

And so the question goes from "which husband can I live with for the short term, just until my friend's wedding?" to "can I live with any of these husbands in the long term?" and eventually to "which version of my *life* can I live with?

There's a point at which Lauren's experience with the attic becomes something like Tinder brought to life. This husband is too tall? Send him back. This husband has a hideous moustache? Send him back. Yet another husband wants to watch "Mastermind"? Send him back. Gramazio keeps things moving, introducing a midway twist or two to keep the book from getting too predictable, but it's worth noting that Lauren's versions of her life are almost all very similar. In some ways the best part of the book is not what happens in it but the impetus to imagine the same version of one's own life. Like, for sensible structural purposes, Lauren's inherited flat keeps her mostly living in London, but I can imagine outcomes of my own life in which I was living in Berkeley or Raleigh or Vancouver or Boston or London or Cologne, to name a few. Oh, or Prague or Eugene or Toronto or...probably some places I've never been in this life. Saskatoon! There's definitely a version of my life in which I moved to Saskatoon.

Three things that I would have liked to see: first, Lauren ends up married to surprisingly few people she knows from real life, and that's kind of odd to me. She never stops to ask herself exactly how far back these possibilities go (is it only about decisions she's made since, say, leaving school, or do decisions her parents made when she was 10 factor in?), and although I don't think that would change things—it's not like she's going back in time—I have to think that there are versions of my own life in which I ended up entangled with someone I first met as a teen.

Second—and I can't actually ding the book for this, because it's clearly an intentional decision, and I understand why—the part of me that enjoys letting my imagination run away with itself wouldn't have minded Lauren's attic being more like Bohai's version of life...though to avoid spoilers, that's all I'll say about that. (But if there's ever a sequel...)

And third, while I again understand that this makes sense within the limitations of what's happening with the attic, I did think it rather a pity that every single outcome here seemed to revolve around which man some version of Lauren has married. And...it would be hard to go from outcome-with-husband to outcome-without-husband and back if sending the husband up to the attic is necessary to reset things, but in that hypothetical sequel, I sort of want to see outcomes (some or all) in which the heroine is living variations on the single life.

But all told, I had a fine old time with this—I loved the concept too much to be plagued by too many questions until I'd finished reading and started thinking more in depth about the "what ifs" of it all. I'll have to keep an eye out for whatever Gramazio writes next.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.