Thanks For The Memories

As you can probably gather, I am huge fan of Cecelia Ahern .So when her latest book ‘Thanks for the Memories’ was released I rushed out to buy it. In just a few days I found that I had read the entire book, it was such a compulsive read I just couldn’t put it down! 

Joyce Conway remembers things she shouldn’t. She knows about tiny cobbled streets in Paris, which she has never visited. And every night she dreams about an unknown little girl with blonde hair.

Justin Hitchcock is divorced, lonely and restless. He arrives in Dublin to give a lecture on art and meets an attractive doctor, who persuades him to donate blood. It’s the first thing to come straight from his heart in a long time.

When Joyce leaves hospital after a terrible accident, with her life and her marriage in pieces, she moves back in with her elderly father. All the while, a strong sense of déjà vu is overwhelming her and she can’t figure out why …

Set in Dublin, so it has an Irish flavor to it. Joyce Conway falls down the stairs and loses the baby she is carrying. This is the final blow for her marriage to Conor, since the possibility of a child was all that was holding it together. It also means that, after her hospitalization, she cannot bring herself to go back to her house where she had a nursery set up. She moves in with her dad, a very likeable old Irish guy who pretends to be a bit more addled than he actually is.

There is another way in which Joyce’s life changes. While she was in the hospital, she needed a transfusion of blood. At the same time, Justin Hitchcock, a divorced American who is guest lecturing in Dublin on art and architecture, is talked into donating blood, and his blood goes to Joyce.

As Joyce recovers from her accident, she finds that she suddenly has acquired knowledge and memories that aren’t her own and can’t be explained. Since the story of Joyce and Justin are told in parallel, the reader can see that the two lives are now entangled; Joyce even gets achy after Justin works out at the gym.

Once again Cecelia Ahern has delivered a true gem of a novel. It has exactly the right mix of heartache, romance and magic to keep readers hanging on her every word from start to finish as you become entangled in the lives of the characters she so realistically describes almost as if watching a movie play out in front of your very eyes....