The Two Lives of Lydia Bird
A Novel
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3.9 • 574 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Two lives. Two loves. One impossible choice. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Reese’s Book Club Pick One Day in December . . .
“I read The Two Lives of Lydia Bird in a single sitting. What a beautiful, emotional gift Josie Silver has given us.”—Jodi Picoult
Written with Josie Silver’s trademark warmth and wit, The Two Lives of Lydia Bird is a powerful and thrilling love story about the what-ifs that arise at life’s crossroads, and what happens when one woman is given a miraculous chance to answer them.
Lydia and Freddie. Freddie and Lydia. They’d been together for more than a decade and Lydia thought their love was indestructible. But she was wrong. On Lydia’s twenty-eighth birthday, Freddie died in a car accident.
So now it’s just Lydia, and all she wants is to hide indoors and sob until her eyes fall out. But Lydia knows that Freddie would want her to try to live fully, happily, even without him. So, enlisting the help of his best friend, Jonah, and her sister, Elle, she takes her first tentative steps into the world, open to life—and perhaps even love—again.
But then something inexplicable happens that gives her another chance at her old life with Freddie. A life where none of the tragic events of the past few months have happened.
Lydia is pulled again and again through the doorway to her past, living two lives, impossibly, at once. But there’s an emotional toll to returning to a world where Freddie, alive, still owns her heart. Because there’s someone in her new life, her real life, who wants her to stay.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
What’s better: a dream life full of make-believe happiness, or a real one—with real heartbreak? This is the question at the heart of Josie Silver’s tender novel. When Lydia loses Freddie, the love of her life, in a tragic car accident, the road to emotional recovery is beyond bleak. Devastated and wracked with insomnia, Lydia discovers that her sleeping pills have an unexpected side effect: They enable her to control her dreams and reunite with Freddie. Thanks to Silver’s powerfully emotive writing, we experience the expansive joy of this discovery alongside Lydia, but we can also feel the uneasiness and fear. After all, wouldn’t the real Freddie want her to rejoin the waking world? We can’t count how many tissues we went through reading this empathetic meditation on love and loss. The Two Lives of Lydia Bird is a comforting and cathartic ode to the healing power of time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Silver's latest (after One Day in December) is a heartbreaking, poignant tale of a woman suffused in a prescription drug-fueled dream state after a great loss. After Lydia Bird's fianc , Freddie Hunter, is killed in a car accident on her birthday, she gets hooked on sleeping pills and retreats into a dreamworld where nothing has changed. Lydia's sister Elle and her mother push her to learn how to build a life without the man she'd been with since she was a teenager and encourage her to redefine her relationship with her late fianc 's best friend, Jonah, who survived the crash. But her dreams continue, aided by the pills, and in them she and Freddie get married, go on their honeymoon, and celebrate Lydia's birthday. After the birth of Elle's daughter, Lydia rises out of her funk and spontaneously flies to Croatia, where she considers a job offer, video chats with Jonah, and tries to imagine a future. Through lush prose, expert plotting, and richly imagined characters, Silver offers an achingly real portrait of grief transposed with the character's intoxicating parallel universe. This will stay with readers long after the final page is turned.
Customer Reviews
Beautiful story of love
Loved the way the ending is written. Thank you for this story of love, loss and love gained.
The two lives of Lydia bird
It took some time to get into this book. The first 20% was so boring, I nearly gave up. It was pretty bizarre, for me and quite tedious. Then is got interesting, at least the awake parts of the book. I mostly skipped the sleeping parts, too strange. I’d rate the awake parts a 5 andtge asleep parts a 1. Not a great book, but not bad.
Fantastic.
I felt like I was living through Lydia’s grief, transformation, acceptance, and moving forward. A beautifully tender story with characters you’ll fall in love with. A story about sisters, mothers and daughters, tragic love, and new beginnings. Thank you for this wonderful read.