When Vivi’s life is shaken suddenly following a heart attack on her 27th birthday, she leaves the perfect, highflying life she is used to, to return to her the seaside town she grew up on, here she searches for the answers to secrets that have plagued the family for decades. There is so much more to this book than the snippet you read in the blurb. This story is about tragedy, family, life, death and loss, and the personal stories of two women.
A great 5 star read, I highly recommend

I have never read this author before. The book was well written but a bit slow and lacking in parts for my liking. Good premise for a storyline and makes you realise how hard it is for anyone waiting for a transplant. Just an ok read for me not as gripping as I thought it would be. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the chance to review it.

I have just finished this thought provoking and emotional book Susan does it again wow the tears the laughter and now the reasoning behind the book!! The characters you can't help but like and the reality that this is life for many people if you read nothing else this year make sure you read this...... Thank you Susan for reminding me how precious life can be!! xx

What an emotionally beautiful story!
I have read a few of Susan Lewis's books before and this was a stunning new one from her.
The number of times my heart was literally on edge as the twists and turns of the stories were revealed... I cannot even count.
I was entranced by the story of Vivi and Josh, and all the history, which had me almost cringing at one point, willing what I thought would happen to not happen... I'm not going to enter into any spoilers here!
The issue with organ donation is such a huge one and handled with true sensitivity by Susan Lewis.
I have to admit to teary eyes by the end of the book.
Definitely, one to recommend.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins for providing me with an arc in exchange for my honest review.

Wow yet another great book from Susan. This one in particular reached me as I had a cousin go through the same thing. Luckily he got his new heart and is still going strong. Nobody thinks that they will get ill and have a death sentence hanging over them before they’ve lived their life. This is exactly what happened to Vivi after having a major heart attack her life changed over night. I loved that Susan showed how it has a knock on effect to all the friends and family of the people affected. Definitely a thought provoking read.

Another triumph from Susan Lewis.
I always really look forward to Susan’s books being published and this one was no exception, I loved it :) 9/10

A wonderful novel of love,hope mystery and tragedy. Also an insight into the world of transplants and the need for organ donation. The characters were lovely.

Another amazing book by Susan Lewis. This made me both laugh & cry. The characters were wonderfully crafted, I loved Vivi from the very beginning and was so invested in her that I cried at the end. There was drama, secrets and mystery but overall a sad romantic tale.

Great read, from the first chapter you are with Viv and waiting for that phone call. Some great surprises are revealed as we move along and mysteries are solved.. The characters are so likeable and I engaged with each of them and just wanted to follow their stories. The book made me think a lot about organ donation. I liked the way the final chapters of the book were written although I was quite surprised at the way things turned out. I would recommend this book to my friends. One Minute can change your life.

This book is great but also very sad. When I started reading this I was a little confused as to how he past and present were connected and then I started guessing it but wasnt right. I don’t want to give too much away about the story but I kept hoping and praying for a miracle to happen...this book is well worth a read but beware, you might end up with tears.

I can’t rate this book highly enough it was so thought provoking. This book conveys such an important message but in such s beautiful way. The story moves between the past and present until the lives of Vivienne and Shelley collide. Vivienne is on the transplant list and you see the impact this has on her and her family. It’s about love and living with limitations and the love of family and friends and Living in hope

Once again I was taken in by an ambiguous blurb on Goodreads. I do not mean to say I did not like the book. I enjoyed it but part of that was overshadowed by my expecting something extremely 'thriller like' to jump out at me. This is not a story of secrets although there is one which doesn't really go the way it appears to say on the blurb that I saw.

This is a tale about people, their bonds and how they come together in times of adversity. It is all about family and all the things that make up families. There is so much in this book and the level of detail of organ donation or heart patients is extensive. We meet Vivienne as a high flying (literally and figuratively since she is always jetting from one country to another) lawyer, she has a group of women who graduated together and are very close. On her birthday everything comes crashing down. Her life is no longer her own and she can in no way control it.Then begins a long process of recovery. 

 Parallelly we are shown the lives of Shelley and Jack who are farmers building up their life while facing pushback from the local Gentry. Their presence in between the re-building of Vivi's new life is a little out of place but it is explained at a later stage. Their paths do cross in the present but it is more depressing for her than for their Shelley's family. The relationships within these pages are very realistic, friends do not go overboard and good friends do not need to justify their emotional attachment constantly, Vivi does not think less about the friend(s) who may not be constantly in touch or always meeting up.

This entire story brings organ donation into strong focus and in a very serious light and amidst all the family drama, there are a lot of positive encouraging ideas which felt good to read about.

Brilliant plot, excellent main characters that you invest in. I read this book in one sitting and I would highly recommend it.

I loved this book, just as I have loved nearly every Susan Lewis novel I have read. This one is so well researched and carries a huge amount of complex information relating to the realities of heart conditions and heart transplants, without ever being boring! Very clever too that it also links to real life even featuring a real-life person, and highlighting the importance of registering as a donor.

I will continue to look out for Susan Lewis novels. I'm hoping the next one won't mention the location of Kesterley-on Sea though!

My NetGalley blurb said that it was about a life that can change in a heartbeat. Well, I think it changed due to the lack of a heartbeat was more like it.

The absolutely horrifying fact that a girl in her twenties can unexpectedly (not so much when you learn all the further story but still, for her it was unexpected) have a major heart attack shook me to my core.

The plot, the secrets, and the character development, however interesting and fast-paced, played only a secondary role to Susan Lewis's descriptions of place and history of it. This book proves to be very educational in knowledge about sheep farming and England's landscapes. Plus, the life around Bristol in the late last century.

I feel like it should come with a warning, though. It does end rather un-Hollywoody. You might end up with a story that's stuck to your memory for a long time, not being able to get over its closeness to reality. It's rare that you read a murder mystery that actually feels utterly believable.

Big thanks to Harper Collins for the chance to read this in exchange for my honest review.

Earlier, under Give Feedback for this novel, I asked for your help as the novel had become inaccessible on my kindle for no apparent reason. I then found that all of my novels were inaccessible, but with the help of Amazon, I retrieved them all the following day. My first contact with you was therefore not a review. I have now finished the novel and the following is my review, which I'll post on Amazon on 21st February.

'One Minute Later tells the story of Vivienne Shager, a high-flying lawyer with a fabulous home and dreamy life style. On her 27th birthday, which she’s in the middle of celebrating with her close friends, the GaLs – Gals at Law, all graduates from LSE Law School - Vivi suffers a major heart attack. This dramatically alters the course of her life, and she is left an invalid, and on the transplant list, waiting for a new heart.

Unable to manage on her own, she returns to her mother and step-father, who live in the small town of Kesterly, which she’d left at 18 to launch herself in London. There she has to come to terms with her limitations, while she waits patiently for a donor heart that could change her life.

But this is not only the story of Vivi, but also of Shelley, Jack and their family, who 30 years earlier, in the summer of 1984, settled in Kesterly, in Deerwood Farm, an idyllic place – almost too idyllic to feel real, I felt at times - which they made into their family home and from which Jack went about his work as a vet.

Viv’s close friend, Michelle, still lives in Kesterly. Although she doesn’t figure largely in the novel, I found it a little confusing that there was both a Shelley and a Michelle, and at first I thought they might be one and the same, but then realised that they weren’t. With all of the possible names the author could have chosen from, I wondered why she would choose such similar names for two different people.

There is also a man on the scene, Shelley and Jack’s extremely attractive son Josh, who also lives in Kesterly.

The stories of Vivi and Shelley are not discrete, however, and one of the characters in the novel has kept a secret over the years, and the ultimate revelation of that secret links the two story lines.

However, this novel is not just the story of Vivi and Shelley, it’s also about organ donation. Increasingly in the novel, Jim Lynskey and his campaign Save9Lives.com, is featured. That this is a genuine campaign is made clear in the acknowledgements. While the book doesn’t contain an explicit plea, as such, for people to sign up as potential organ donors if they haven’t already done so, the subject is dominant in the book and this would seem to be the author’s intention.

The subject was too dominant, I rather felt. Promoting a cause she clearly believed in took over from telling a story, and I became a little fed up with all of the repetitive details about Vivi’s heart, how she felt at different times and her awareness of its movement, about the way she must live, the possible procedures she might undergo, and the experience of Jim. This exposition took the place of a strong story.

However, although issue novels are not really my taste, I can see that this novel, which was extremely well researched, could be of great interest to those who enjoy such novels, and this is, indeed, a tremendously worth-while cause to promote (I have long been a registered donor myself). My personal response is based on my preferences, and should be seen as no more than that.

As always, the writing was as fluent and readable as one has come to expect from a Susan Lewis novel.

Thank you, Net Galley and Harper Collins for an advance copy of the novel.'



Help, please!!

I'm 47% into the novel (at Chapter 12, I think it is), and last night a box flashed on to the kindle screen saying that if I recieved the book from Amazon, I should move to Cloud. There was no way of removing the box other than by clicking OK. As I wanted to get on with the book, which I'm enjoying, and, assuming that OK meant no more than that I'd read the message, I clicked on it. The book has now been removed from my kindle, and I can't access it. First thing this morning, I tried to 'Send it to Kindle' again, but my kindle is not accepting it.

I had hoped to review the book for the 21st February. Are you able to enable it to be sent again to my kindle, please?

Although this isn't a review, I've had to tick the star box in order to send it.

Thank you.

Oh my! What a story! This is so much more than I expected. Tears and laughter throughout. This is such a truly emotional story that takes you on Vivi's journey.

A poignant tale of love and loss.


Susan Lewis is a best-selling author of exactly this kind of book. And I need to admit that this kind of book is not my kind of book. That is not the book’s fault but just a personal preference as a reader and a side-effect of being a cynic by nature. However, I did find that, despite this, it definitely was an engrossing, page-turner and I found myself investing in the characters’ fates.

There are two storylines which are presented independently and they alternate between Vivienne’s story which takes place in the present day and Shelley’s tale which begins in the early 1980’s.

Vivienne is a young woman who is living an enviable life as a high-flying lawyer in fast-paced London until a congenital birth heart defect rears its monstrous, near-fatal head. She is forced to reassess and change her entire life and undergoes an emotionally-challenging and, often, debilitating journey as she comes to terms with her own mortality.

Shelley is a young wife and mother who, with her beloved childhood sweetheart and now husband, swop out the city life to take on the challenges of running a farm they have inherited, the sprawling and magical Deerwood Farm.

The universal threads that run through both stories include choices, change, loss and love. Lewis writes tenderly about all of these themes and her descriptions of both people and places are rich and detailed though it was easy to get confused with certain names – especially in Shelley’s story – as the pages overflow with a multitude of characters, some even of the animal variety.

I found the first half of the book very difficult to navigate; not because I struggled to jump between the different spaces, times and narratives from chapter to chapter but because there seemed to be no real connection, bar a few “teasers”, which appeared to link the two. But those were vague and left me feeling incredibly frustrated. I understand the premise of holding suspense but I perhaps didn’t have the patience to follow the disparate lives of these two individual women for so long into the novel before it all made sense. I also found that certain parts were too drawn out, while other segments seemed to border on being slightly contrite and cliché.

Vivienne’s complex and codependent relationship with her mother was well presented and underscored the deep, dark secret which both separated them and bound them together. Vivienne is a conflicted woman, which is understandable given the circumstances she has to grapple with, but her physical and emotional fragility lends itself to her often being filled with self-pity which made it hard for me to sympathise with her at times. She does have moments of strength and determination which makes the reader want to rally to her side and help her through her ordeal.

Shelley’s character is strong, believable and utterly likeable. In fact, her entire family displayed no negative personality traits at all which seems to be asking a lot of the reader’s imagination. But their antics on the rambling farm made for interesting and entertaining reading.

Once the two storylines merged in an almost predictable fashion, it almost seemed worth the wait, as the reader is swept along on an intensely emotional journey that is drenched in bitter-sweet romance. While it may not be riveting, it is an intensely evocative read.

I also thought that part of the last portion of the book was more about advocating for a particular (albeit worthy) cause than it was a natural continuation of the story up until that point. But I understand the need for it to be included as was echoed in the acknowledgements.

This book was not for me but if you’re looking for a sweeping, moving, hopeful love story with a few twists and turns, then this book is definitely for you.


Desiree-Anne Martin


Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

I kind of think of Susan Lewis as a British Jodi Picoult, with sweeping, family-driven, issues-laden stories that focus on human emotion and are generally written from multiple perspectives. I don't mean that as a criticism at all. I really like those kinds of books. They're meaty, but not gory - focused on human emotions and human lives, and full of relatable characters. So when I saw that Susan Lewis's latest book was available for request on NetGalley, I clicked the request button, and was even more delighted to be approved.

I enjoyed this book a lot. At its heart a romance, the story of Vivi learning to adapt to her new life and how things have changed when she suffers a major cardiac incident is by turns swoonworthy and heartbreaking, and intertwined with Shelley's story thirty years earlier, there's plenty going on here to keep you entertained.

From the beginning of the book, I had my suspicions about how things would turn out, and although I got some aspects right, I got some aspects very wrong, and was delighted to see how the past intertwined with the present. Having thought about how the plot played out, I can totally see that there were hints there that I should have picked up on, which is testament to Lewis' style of writing. I feel a bit like someone being held by the hand and explained something gently after the fact, and then feeling really impressed that there were hints of it laid out throughout the book.

The ending, however, felt a little rushed and a little disappointing, because it could easily have been the best part of the book. Sadly, I didn't feel like it was given enough time to really land, and resonate, but I can understand as well why that decision was made.

An important theme through the book is the need for people to register as organ donors. Without being preachy, it's interesting to see how a real-life campaign and person - Jim Lynskey and Save9Lives.com - can be intertwined with the fictional story of Vivi and finding her heart. I'm already signed up to be an organ donor, and have made my wishes known to my parents, but if even one person comes away from this book and decides to sign up to be a donor, that's the potential for nine more lives to be saved.

Packed with emotion and enough twists and turns to keep anyone entertained, this was a great addition to Susan Lewis's huge body of work, and well worth the time.

Another heartwrenching Susan Lewis story. I need to remind myself to buy extra tissues when I read one of her books. SO easy to read and become absorbed in, and the characters are bought to life with the vivid personality portrayals. Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me to review