Breakaway Books

Authored by Beatriz Williams; Published June 2024; Historical Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

The style in which Husbands & Lovers is written is popular now: two intertwining narratives, set decades apart. But I’m not sure I’ve read a novel where the two narratives are quite so separate, even if they are both compelling in their own way.

Husbands & Lovers follows Mallory, a modern-day single mother trying her best to keep her son alive after a freak accident. When her son’s father, a famous rockstar whom Mallory never told about their child, announces he is getting married, Mallory’s sister can’t help but intervene. The second narrative is centered on Hannah, the wife of a British diplomat in Cairo in 1950–and Mallory’s grandmother. Hannah falls in love with an Israeli spy working at a local hotel, and when Cairo explodes into aggressive protests, she must figure out how to survive. 

It seems relatively clear that the question of paternity is supposed to link these two narratives, with Mallory hiding the existence of her son Sam from his father, and Hannah offering up for adoption the product of her affair with an Israeli spy. But with a novel like this, I normally expect to see echoes between the generations, a clear call and response between the narratives, and I can’t say I did in this instance. However, I did enjoy both of the narratives separately—Monk, Mallory’s long-lost love, is so charming and besotted that he could melt any heart, and Hannah’s story takes place during a fascinating bit of history on the Sinai Peninsula. Mallory is living out a traditional rom-com, and Hannah seems stuck in a painful post-WW II historical fiction novel.

The contrast between the two makes Mallory, a single mother whose son has to have dialysis multiples a week, look like she is living the easy life. Hannah nearly starves at the end of WWII in Hungary after losing two children to disease, and frankly, it was jarring to switch from her perspective to lavish vacation homes on Cape Cod. It was almost enough to make me want to stay with Mallory’s story start to finish, in which her and her sister’s exploration of their ancestry and discovery of Hannah plays only a small part. (Incidentally, in Mallory’s place, I would have been furious with her sister, who does enough meddling to merit a lifetime ban.) Hannah is emotionally closed, fixated on survival alone after her experience in Hungary, while Mallory’s emotional world is broader and far more transparent to the reader. To me, it made her a far more accessible and likable heroine. 

Husbands & Lovers comes off as a little disjointed, but appealing nonetheless. If you can’t decide between a romance novel and historical fiction, you may want to pick this one up.