Review by Jonathan Wilkins of "All the Days I Did Not Live" by Anna Vaught

Firstly, I do judge a book by its cover, and Will Dady’s design is beautiful and instantly drew me in. I wanted to see what was inside, and I was not disappointed. From the very start, the language is beguiling and sensual. Descriptions are crystal clear and haunting.

Catherine loses her husband and doesn’t show much grief, which annoys her family - particularly her daughter Martha, who, perhaps, sees herself in her mother and now resents her for it. 

Gabriel was a functional man, Catherine a sensual woman, and she had had that slowly squeezed out of her. Her father wanted her to be "pliable" and tried to persuade her husband to make her so. They didn’t realise that she had overheard this conversation, and it had festered in her mind. She already despised her father, who was a cruel man who had crushed her mother. His behaviour is alluded to, but never fully described, so we have to make our own assumptions.

Catherine's mental health is also an issue. She is at odds again with her family, who want to protect her, who want her to act in a "normal" way, to grieve "correctly." The tensions are palpable. She eschews mourning and goes out to shows, buys "unsuitable" makeup and two phones as an act of rebellion, and also wonders whether she stole something from a shop at the same time.

This is where the story turns. We had already met Alec, another widower who lost his wife slowly to illness, and is still deeply in love with her memory. He rings the phone, his wife’s old number and finds that Catherine has purchased it. They flirt; they meet and have a brief, tumultuous sexual affair in Paris. Alec is everything that Gabriel wasn’t, and Catherine delights in his bed. Paris was the scene of her honeymoon with Alec, a clever trope echoing how cold Gabriel was compared to Alec.

Alec still misses his wife. What Catherine does next is exciting. Too much information will spoil this for you, but I found it an intoxicating story. Some words jump out and shock you, but it is all the better for the metamorphosis of Catherine. 

Will her children understand? Her mother does. What will she do with her newfound freedom? Will her hopes now come true, after the constraints of her married life? It is all in the title, and we have to interpret it as we wish. This is the beauty of the tale. It is eloquent, passionate, sensuous, and wonderfully descriptive, open to so many different interpretations. It charts a dysfunctional series of relationships, some irreversibly broken over time, but others restored. 

Do read this.

About the reviewer

Jonathan Wilkins is 69. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones’ bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester and Warwick Universities. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.

You can read more about All the Days I Did Not Live by Anna Vaught on Creative Writing at Leicester here.