This is a beautiful story of friendship and loneliness
This book deals with difficult topics including grief but still manages to be uplifting.
I adored this book

Quirky, joyful, heartwarming.

Thanks so much to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me access an advance copy of this book in exchange for my feedback.

Eliza and Ada live opposite each other on a quiet street in Oxford.

Eliza is a student and Ada is a pensioner who lives alone after the death of her husband. Both women are lonely and lacking purpose in their lives.

Each chapter alternates between Ada and Eliza, until their paths inevitably cross.

I found Eliza really irritating at first and found her chapters so slow and dull. She’s the type of person who says ‘lol’ out loud, and is totally hung up on her controlling ex girlfriend. I much preferred Ada’s character and found her a lot more interesting and endearing.

When the women meet, they change each other’s lives for the better and Eliza’s character improves a bit and she becomes slightly more likeable.

The plot is alright once it gets going, and I liked Ada’s business venture, Rent-A-Gran. For at least the first half of the book it is really slow paced and drags along without too much going on.

The cover of the book is a lovely eye catching yellow with an owl on the front. Both of these elements have significance in the story.

Overall, it’s quite a nice story about an unlikely friendship. There’s some humour and poignant moments.

Thanks to NetGalley and Orion Publishing Group for a copy of this book to review.

Quite simply a really lovely read. It had such an easy style and the reader really grew to know and like the characters. Thank you.

Think 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry' or 'Finding Henry Applebee' and you're halfway there. Focussing on the cross-generational friendship between heartbroken post-graduate student and recently widowed OAP, Ada, the plot gathers apace about midway through when the pair finally meet.

The pair live on opposite sides of Swinburne Road in Oxford and are isolated by their recent histories. Leaf Arbuthnot's astute observations of both women's experiences are engaging and eye-opening for those of us immersed in our own life-plots: Ada is flummoxed by the introduction of self-service machines at her local store finding, "she hadn't realised how much she'd been relying on her daily trips to the shop on the Iffley Road to supplement her human diet" whilst Eliza's every moment is quieted by an internal monologue dictated by her recent controlling relationship; creating an enormous barrier between her and the rest of the world, 'Eliza tried to participate in the merry gossip but lost track of the names and fell to looking out of the window'. Above all, it is this loneliness that speaks to the reader; recognising loneliness as 'an affliction like obesity or AIDS.'

Most charming is the two characters ability to recognise the sorrow in the other's solitude and to help her to heal and reach a new understanding, "I feel now I know well the difference between being alone and feeling alone."

Whilst the slow start and delay in Eliza and Ada's meeting allow the reader to become familiar with both women's situations, it feels like an unnecessarily long wait and a great weight too - of great indigestion-inducing gob-fulls of information that would have been better more evenly spread throughout.

Nevertheless an enjoyable and gentle read about the human condition upon which we all have cause to reflect at different points in our lives.

My thanks to Netgalley, the author and publisher for sharing an advance copy with me in return for my honest opinion.

I'd read Leaf's journalism before so knew I would enjoy the style of this. Very moving, gently comic - I enjoyed it immensely.

This gentle but affecting story still sits with me after reading. Eliza is a student who finds herself haunted by a relationship gone wrong, and Ada is a grieving widow trying to find her place in a world which seems to have left her behind. A clash of worlds leads to a burgeoning friendship which leads them both to places they wouldn't have found without the other. Well written characters who you really come to care for as the story progresses. I found it an interesting look at loneliness, and how this can impact upon your life - sometimes without you even knowing it.

Set in Oxford,nestled in the world of academia are two women, generations apart, both living on the same ‘hidden’ road, existing in their own bubbles of self isolation.
Eliza is engaged in her doctorate about the life and work of Primo Levi, adrift and lonely after escaping from her one long term but unhealthy relationship with Ruth. Living in far from salubrious accommodation I imagined the graduate world of Oxford to be quite lonely, full of geeky wealthy privileged individuals lauding their superiority at every opportunity and wearing their intelligence as a badge of honour. Eliza doesn’t fit into this category at all, hailing from Carlisle where she’s lived with her gardener father Rich, abandoned by her mother. Loneliness can strike at any age and the break up of a relationship can make some people more introverted, shielding themselves from further hurt which I think Eliza has learned to do very well. However, I couldn’t warm to this character in the beginning, finding all the academic references quite tedious, waiting for something interesting to happen.
Across the road from Eliza lives Ada, still caught in the bewildering stages of bereavement and feeling as equally lonely and isolated as Eliza. Married to Michael, once a professor in Italian at Oxford, Ada is an acclaimed poet in her own right but is suffering from intense feelings of pointlessness, invisibility and a lack of usefulness. I really liked this character as she didn’t allow these feelings to completely overwhelm her, choosing to go out into the world as a widowed woman, determined to make her mark. Her rather bonkers idea of Rent-a-Gran provides much of the humour in this novel, meeting a motley crew of individuals all seeking her help for all sorts of different reasons . I absolutely loved this idea and marvelled at how resourceful and inspiring Ada proved to be.
I spent the whole of the first half of this book waiting for Eliza and Ada’s worlds to collide. Once this happened I enjoyed the second half far more, having up to that point only really engaged with Ada’s story. I will have to disagree with other reviews that pronounce Looking for Eliza a perfect book for these times of self isolation as whilst some parts amused me I did find much of the tone bleak in the first part of the novel. I totally understand how uplifting and hopeful Ada and Eliza’s inter generational friendship should appear to the reader and on most levels it does work but I can’t pinpoint exactly why this burgeoning relationship didn’t fill me with the joy I had anticipated. As the storyline progresses it does become far more readable and relatable with these women’s combined love of lapsang souchong and the life of Primo Levi propelling their friendship forward. At times their interactions felt like Eliza was a Michael substitute, with such an easy flow to their conversations and a blossoming love that held so much hope for the pair of them. With a brighter future ahead I grew almost as fond of Eliza as I did Ada but for me it’s the older woman who captured my heart.
A novel that I recommend as it is beautifully written, touching and warm and compassionate.
My thanks as always to the publisher and Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read.

Sorry this book is not for me. I could not get into the writing style or the characters.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

Ada is a poet and recently widowed. For the first time in her life ahes feeling lonely. She put up adverts for a "rent a gran" service and that she will do anything from cooking advice to babysitting.

Eliza is a student at university. She finds it hard to form meaningful relationships. She's estranged from her mum and broken up with her girlfriend. She now thinks it will be easier to live on her own.

It obvious that the two women's paths will eventually cross. Thenoace is slow until the women meet and then it starts to pick up. We follow the women through some events in their lives and the emotions they go through. Sometimes we get a bit information overload but there is some humor thrown in too. I also felt the ending was a bit rushed.


I would like to thank NetGalley, Orion Publishing Group and the author Leaf Arbuthnot for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Cross-Generational Loneliness - a great debut!

Oh my goodness I absolutely loved this. I laughed out loud at some parts and teared up at others. What a great story.... I didn’t want it to finish.

An easy read, nice and light about the lives of two woman who become very good friends until a misunderstanding separates them. Could the circumstances near the end have been avoided if this hadn’t have happened? Who knows?

The way in which Arbuthnot pulled this together was brilliant.

Here you are plunged into the life of a young woman called Eliza where it explores relationships with her parents, lovers, friends and acquaintances..... hurt in the past, the experience of which and the effect it has on her, results in distressing consequences.

What I really loved about this is the fact that the characters are real life, they could be people you know, the story is realistic, moving and heart warming.

Eliza makes friends with Ada, someone quite a lot older than her, however they have so much in common that bonds them instantly. Loneliness, lapsang souchong tea and Primo Levi, the study of who is the conduit that pulls all of this together.

Ada, a poet, is widowed and misses her husband, Michael, however she is still young at heart and sets up a Rent-a-Gran business, which works really well. Ada definitely sees life as a Rent-a-Gran 😂😂😂

It’s not perfect. As life isn’t. We all make mistakes. We can be mean, thoughtless, too proud, petulant and we sometimes hurt the people we care about and love.

Change, loss, sadness, grief, acts of aggression, jealousy, hidden wounds, friendship, complicated relationships, disappointment, frustration, loneliness, LGBT, success and love are all covered across Eliza and Ada’s journey. The power of forgiveness is core.

Most definitely 5⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ from me.

Thank you to the author, Netgalley and Orion Publishing Group for this ARC provided in exchange for this unbiased review.

Ada is a widowed writer, navigating loneliness in Oxford after the death of her husband. She has no children. No grandchildren. She fears she is becoming peripheral, another invisible woman. Eliza is a student at the university. She finds it difficult to form meaningful relationships after the estrangement of her mother and breakup with her girlfriend. After meeting through Ada’s new venture, ‘Rent-a-Gran’, and bonding over Lapsang Souchong tea and Primo Levi, they begin to find what they’re looking for in each other. But can they cast off their isolation for good?

Leaf Arbuthnot’s Looking for Eliza is a beautifully tender story that has human connection at its core. The universality of the importance of relationships is the thread that runs through it, whether it’s the warm hearted Ada or open minded Eliza, both are looking for something.

I found the read pacy, exciting, and fascinating. A delicate touch on deep psychological yearnings and the human condition.

I spoke to Leaf to learn more.

Where did the idea for Looking For Eliza come from?

Japan, strangely enough. A few years ago I heard that people there were making money from pretending to be someone’s girlfriend, wife, friend, dad. It struck a chord. While materially a lot of us aren’t lacking, I think many of us are suffering from emotional deficits. We’re lonely. I wanted to explore how it might feel to sell your time and personality and attention, in an intimate way that doesn’t involve sex. I didn’t want to set my story in Japan as I’ve not been and I also wanted to probe Englishness. So I came up with the idea of an older woman who lives in Oxford and decides to set up a business where she rents herself out as a gran, after her husband dies. Once Ada had come to me (more or less wholesale as she is in the book) other characters slinked up too, most notably Eliza.

Who is looking for Eliza? Is it Ada trying to find friendship? Eliza trying to find herself?

For readers who’ve not read the book: Eliza is my younger character, who’s 25 and doing a PhD. She lives opposite Ada, who’s a poet in her seventies and who starts the ‘rent-a-gran’ business after her husband dies. Both characters are quietly questing, as I see it. Eliza’s had her heart trashed by a former girlfriend. She and Ruby had a long relationship, and Eliza is now having to find out how to be alone as an adult. It’s something I’ve had to do in my life: when you de-extricate from someone you love, you can find that the muscles you once relied on to stand up straight by yourself have weakened. So Eliza is trying to work out who she is, or who she can be, in her own right. There’s a chapter I loved writing in which she basically tries everything: casual sex, art, religion, whatever to make herself feel whole.

As for Ada, I see her as not realising, for quite some time after the death of her husband, that she needs to continue to develop as a person. She has had the most magnificent marriage, and quite a rich life though not one full of achievements. But she learns after Michael’s death that she can’t just lead the same life she was leading before minus him. She needs to take charge and act to enrich her life again. She needs friends, basically. I’ve been interested for a long time in how friendships multiply or die off – too many older people I know have failed to keep friendships alive, often for legit reasons (they were busy having kids for instance). Ada eventually realises she needs other people; solitude isn’t feasible forever.

What do you think intergenerational friendships offer that friendships of people of a similar age don’t?

Perspective mainly. Older people tend to take a longer view and can encourage younger friends to see the wood for the trees. My grandmother is 100 and I’ve found talking to her over the years to be immensely reassuring. For someone who has lived since 1919, as she has, there are few problems you can take to her that she views as insurmountable or even significant. Generally I also think that friendships across generations are often less encumbered by envy, rivalry, longing and judgement. You’re at different stages in your life. One of my closest friends is a man in his mid sixties – my parents’ age – and while we don’t see eye to eye on almost anything (particularly politics) there’s a shared sense of humour there that’s precious to me.

Obviously friendships with people of a similar age are important. I would be nowhere without my cohort of friends; the pandemic has underlined that over and over. But I don’t think we invest in intergenerational friendships enough in Britain, or take them seriously. In fact often young people are shown boating in to telephone vulnerable lonely oldies, which I understand is important, but can underemphasise how much they stand to gain from that connection.

There’s some beautifully romantic – and sensual – passages as Eliza falls in love, sleeps with people, and discovers women she fancies. You don’t often read about lesbian or bisexual relationships, even in our enlightened times. Why do you think this is?

Thank you, I’m slightly bemused to report that the “sex scenes” in the book – if you can call them that – were among my favourite bits to write. I’ve tried to work out why, and I think it’s because sex is such a strange and dramatic experience that it was therapeutic to try to work it out on the page. I could have made it more explicit but I didn’t think the passages needed that.

It’s true that lesbian and bisexual love and sex still doesn’t get much of a showing in mainstream novels. Too often I think same-sex love is ushered into the rainbow corner. I think authors who are straight are probably now a little wary of writing same-sex relationships for fear of appropriation. There’s also a deficit of experience that they probably baulk at. And other challenges arise with it. If you’re writing say a story about a family, by making the parents two women or two men, you might as a writer feel the need to address the unusualness of that dynamic. The book could be dismissed as some LGBTQ+ story. I can see writers not wanting to clutter up their tale with those questions and concerns.

But for me, Eliza meandered over as a bisexual young woman so that’s how she stayed in the book. I didn’t feel the need to get too entangled in a discussion about her sexuality. It does come up though, because Ada, in her seventies, can’t help but be fascinated by Eliza’s sexuality. I think it’s normal for people of an older generation to be gripped by the sexual proclivities of the young, to stress about them choosing their own gender, etc, and I wanted to probe that.

You’re a literary critic. Does close reading of other books help inform your writing?

Absolutely. There are two strands to this question, I guess. Firstly there’s my work as a book critic, which is vital to my writing because I’ve been reading contemporary stuff forensically for years now, and have been able to work out what I like and what I don’t. But the more important strand here is my reading generally. I read pretty widely (novels and poetry, I have to force myself to read non-fiction). I find there is a horrifyingly direct relationship between what I read and what I write. If I’m not reading interesting nourishing books, I’m not writing anything worth the word doc it’s typed on. Reading novels and poetry is the foundation of my work as a writer. I am baffled by novelists who don’t read. If you’re a non-fiction author it’s a slightly different thing.

There are perils though. Sometimes I write a sentence and it has the flex or shimmer of something I’ve read before, and once I’ve found that sentence I feel pretty dumb and cheap. Sometimes those lines are from something highbrow, but they can be from stuff like Harry Potter which I listened to constantly as a kid, or even hymns, which is more cringe.

Ada and Eliza’s lives seem destined to mingle, taking the best from each other to improve what they are missing. But life has a few twists that neither of them is expecting. This was an amiable story about the complexities of creating new friendships while dealing with the after effects of loss.

I loved the amusing subplot of the rent a granny scheme as these exploits were the perfect counterbalance to the emotional punch of Ada’s loneliness.

3.5 rounded up.
This is the intergenerational story of Eliza the Oxford student and Ada the widower. Now I love this type of story and anything with an older character in usually, but unfortunately this one didn't quite grab my heart as much as I expected.
The start of the story is quite slow, but once the characters meet it does pick up and I enjoyed reading about their relationship. The writing for a debut was solid and I could clearly picture the street and the houses where the majority of the story takes place.
I felt I needed more time with the characters together though and I would love to see a follow up.
Overall a good read and one I would recommend really immersing yourself in and reading in big chunks.

Looking for Eliza is a novel about friendship and loneliness between different generations, set in Oxford. Ada is a recently widowed poet and Eliza is a new PhD student at the university, and both are isolated in their own ways. Eliza is still reeling from breaking up with her undergrad girlfriend and is separated from her mother, whilst Ada gets most of her interactions from the local shop until she starts up a 'Rent A Gran' service to try and get out of the house. Will their new friendship help not only bring them out of loneliness, but help them to get back on with other things in their lives too?

The characters and setting appealed to me, but unfortunately the novel didn't live up to expectations in its execution. The first half of the book is mostly an overwhelming amount of information about the two main characters' lives before they meet, and then their friendship takes up much less space, with a rushed ending. This meant it felt a bit like you had to be brought up to speed before you could read the second half which was what the book was about, an unlikely friendship bringing people out of loneliness. The other issue I had with the novel is the way the characters felt like stereotypes at times, particularly Eliza as a working class student at Oxford (and the treatment of class in general felt a bit off).

Ada and Eliza had a fair amount in common (not least the academic work of Eliza and Ada's husband) and it was interesting to look at how they could get along so well despite the age gap and some difference of opinions, but the reading experience just didn't quite work due to the narrative structure and pacing.

I’m so desperately sorry to say I found this one a bit of a struggle. I feel dreadful for saying it, but I simply couldn’t warm to either of the two leads, Eliza or Ada, no matter how hard I (or they) tried.

But... just because we didn’t hit it off doesn’t mean to say you won’t! Everyone of us and our personal circumstances is unique, something Ada and Eliza demonstrate well.

However, for me their strengths and vulnerabilities should have been exposed through a series of interesting, varied shaped stepping stones rather than huge boulders of information that obstructed the story’s progression. This was such a shame, as the rent-a-gran idea and the missing sculpture elements were endearing.

Much like everyone else varied topics appeal to me. This includes people’s personal issues and dilemmas, not to be nosy you understand (!), but to see how they tackle and hopefully overcome them. Alas, it began to feel as though every possible social issue had had its checkbox ticked.

Perhaps if I’d gelled with the Eliza and Ada from the beginning this review might be totally different. I really can’t say. As things are, I’m afraid this one wasn’t for me :(

A nice enjoyable read, but I was hoping for a better relationship between the two characters, it was sweet but I didn’t really feel any connection with them so I found it hard to connect with the story emotionally. A nice tale but didn’t wow me.

Thank you for the arc copy of this book.
I enjoyed the story and found it quite sweet how the relationship developed.
A book I enjoyed but didn't blow me away.

This book was like a warm hug. I read it in two sittings. It's a charming, witty and heart-warming story about friendship and finding out about yourself. I really felt like I was in Oxford, living alongside the characters as they navigated their ups and downs. I'd highly recommend!

Set against a backdrop very familiar to me this book follows the lives of recently widowed and very lonely Ada and lost and alone graduate student Eliza.
The book neatly follows the two individuals through a number of incidents in their lives, each one spot on with the descriptions of the emotions and anxieties being suffered, until eventually they are lead to each other.
There are real moments of humour, particularly with Ada's rent-a-gran business clients and real moments of despair with Eliza continued bad decisions but the light they bring to each others lives is really beautiful to read and their little street with the yellow front door and the house under repair really grounds the characters into reality.
A gentle read with, on occasion perhaps a bit too much information thrown at you in a big chunk (almost as if the details should have happened earlier on but were skipped and the author was making up for that by wedging them in almost as an aside to the story) that interrupted the flow a little.