THE BEST WAY TO BURY YOUR HUSBAND BY ALEXIA CASALE

My, but this book is good. It treads in so many places where angels would fear to, tripping across difficult and heart-breaking issues with just the right weight of feet. As balancing acts go, the book, together with the explanations at beginning and end, is perfect.

In a moment of anger driven by fear, intensified by lockdown, Sally kills her violent husband with a skillet. Her first reaction, quite normally in my view, is to eat copious amounts of cake and ice cream, for the rather logical reason she won’t be able to have them in prison. But prison isn’t somewhere she wants to go, for the sake of her adult children, so she needs to find both a way to dispose of her husband’s body – and a plausible story for how he disappeared.

However Sally is not the only new widow. First she comes across Ruth, then notices Samira and her daughter Leila have the same rather strange items in their shopping trolley as she had just a few days before. And later on the exhausted mother of a new baby joins them.

I love books about unlikely friendships and this is perhaps the most unlikely of all. But it’s so much more than that. It’s perfectly tensioned, emotionally gripping and has definite moments of humour. Quite brilliant in fact. Read it.