If you haven’t read this book then pick it up now!! I honestly cannot recommend this highly enough. I have seen this being mentioned by authors I love (Lucy Vine & Lindsey Kelk) so I was really excited to receive an advance copy of this. There is a piece of every single woman in Olive, totally relatable and easy to identify with.
Olive is just figuring life out and sometimes it looks a little different to how other people see it. At the end of the day, just like in real life - it doesn’t matter, why’s it a problem. Just do you!!
Love love love this!!!!!!

"I don't want to forget that we are still young. It's clear that our lives are at a major crossroads. We are no longer sat at the traffic lights, though, everyone is already zooming off in different directions. I wish everyone and everything would slow down just for a moment."

Olive is in her early thirties and lives in London with long-term boyfriend, Jacob. She is a journalist who loves her job working at .dot magazine. She remains close to her three childhood and university friends, Bea, Cecily and Isla. As they all settle down, marrying and starting families, Olive is pretty sure she doesn't want children, but everyone else thinks she will change her mind. Jacob wants children and so when he ends their relationship because of this, we follow Olive as she struggles, feeling distant from her friends.

Focusing on Olive and her friends, the narrative moves from earlier points in their friendship, and Olive's relationship with Jacob, providing context. Gannon writes movingly and with empathy, about the four womens' different choices and situations, all of which have their difficulties. Motherhood, infertility, IVF, the choice to be child-free, infidelity, and their many perspectives are experienced by the four friends. Olive struggles with the incompatibilities of her friends' feelings and personal situations and her own, along with society's idea of what a woman should be doing with her life. Cliché-free, everyone doesn't get a happy ending. This is a brilliant, affectionate and empowering read about friendship and life choices, particularly women who want to live child-free.

Out of the four women, my path probably most closely resembles Cecily, having married and had children in my early thirties. Whilst many of my friends have children, some have chosen not to and some are unable to, so I have some understanding of their situations. I can see this resonating with many women, just wish I could have read it a decade ago!

What Emma Gannon achieves in Olive, is nothing short of wonderful. It is an incredibly powerful novel, tackling a complex societal issue, and yet it remains relatable and accessible all the way through.

The novel follows the main character, Olive as she navigates her early thirties with her close friends, who she has been best friends with since school. The novel moves seamlessly between her twenties and thirties, introducing new themes and situations in a very easy-to-follow way. Olive is a young woman, with a great career, which she loves, who has recently broken up with her long-term boyfriend, Jacob.

The book focuses on the expectations placed on Olive and her friends as women, the expectation that they will get married, have children, and so when Olive’s narrative and life does not follow this route, we see, through the book, how she navigates and negotiates this with her friends.

The issues Olive faces, from both her friends and strangers is something many women will be familiar with, and it opened a lot of questions and areas to explore for myself personally. I myself have never been sure if I wanted children, and this book is a great step in understanding the different perspectives of women, and encourages us all to be kind to one another no matter where life takes us.

I really would recommend this book, not just for the way it has been written, but for how elegantly Emma tackles the issue of adulthood, and specifically as women what we can face for not going down a more ‘traditional’ route of having children, and that there should no longer by a prescribed ‘family’ model. Family can mean anything, it doesn’t have to have kids, it can have kids, it can involve partners, or not. It is ultimately the choice of the individual, which should be respected.

There are lot of nuanced perspectives, and you can really examine the characters. None of them are perfect, and at times all of them, including Olive, are frustrating and challenging, but that is the magic of a book like this. These characters are real, relatable, and honest.

Great work from Emma, and I look forward to seeing this book in print later this year. It is certainly one I will be getting for my shelf.

This is an easy and enjoyable read. It tackles the problem faced by many 30 somethings who feel a ticking clock - do they join in with the vast majority and have children, or decide against it, or perhaps nature decides for you. At this point friendships that you really thought were forever tend to get frayed, neglected or just past their sell by date.

I was interested in the four different viewpoints and how they did not complement each other, leading to fallings out and unhappiness. My one gripe is the end, in my world worn experience I am not sure that they would be able to maintain the friendship. Sorry all you hopeful 30 year olds but things change, people change and your mate from school who you can never imagine not being friends with may well disappear from your life.

Lovely story. I found the timelines a bit confusing and more than once had to go back and re check what year I was in!
Characters stayed true to themselves and overall I enjoyed it.

Emma Gannon’s debut novel Olive initially felt like she had taken a microscope to look at my thoughts and had wrote her findings in book form. From the recognisable references of using outlets like Instagram as a way to busy your mind and reflect the day you wish you were having, to the ever-bearing new realities of growing up, down to shamefully admitting being convinced University Challenge sat their teams above each other not realising it was a split screen (I really thought this too). Olive’s character resonates familiarity and relatability all throughout and catches your attention straight away in this homeliness.

My notes throughout reading this book kept referring back to the book every young, female writer had drafted on her teenage laptop but never finished. The story of the writer who grows up, drowning in empty notebooks given as gifts every year, to find that her headstrong, career driven life isn’t agreeable with everyone else’s. The story we all wanted to tell. In some ways, Gannon’s writing style seems almost simplistic, as though her teenage self did write it but decided not to edit the over sharing, over-referenced style realism. I couldn’t decide throughout if this was something I admired or not, but I know there was something about this story that I loved.

For me, Olive’s story is a fable, teaching young women to have faith in their own choices. It’s a flagship story urging women to trust themselves and not waste their lives anxiety-ridden, trying to justify their head-strong decisions to everyone else. The more you do this the less head-strong you become and the more of yourself you lose.

The fractured chronology works for this novel as a metaphorical composition showing readers that the bits fit together in the end – a lesson I think Gannon is urging her readers to understand. Olive and her close group of friends demonstrate the realistic alterations we all experience in friendships as we transfer from childhood through to adulthood. The constant back and forth of WhatsApp excuses on why we have to have our third rain check in a row and the realigning of priorities at every stage in our life. Gannon puts those unspoken memories that form our womanhood unashamedly into black and white: like the sharing of a moment in a public bathroom with your friend, praying only one line appears on the test, to deeply felt break ups we feel weak for caring about, to the passing by of life through one decision to the next. These unspoken memories are often the things that get left behind as taboo or shame, until we eventually might share them with our own daughters. For Olive, she bears all to her readers as almost a process of becoming unapologetically herself.

A Bildungsroman with a twist; Olive grows up without that moment of coming of age epiphany which instead can be found in the depths of her anxiety and worrying where we see in fact she has come of age. Unsure if it’s the childlike relatability or not, I found some of the cultural references and the sometimes unnecessary information shared often shoehorned into sentences irrelevantly. However, despite this on the whole I think this is a story young women should read. Yet again, showing women it’s okay if you don’t want the typical life mothering children and is a story that should be used as a warning not to waste your time justifying yourself and just live!

Watch out for Emma Gannon’s book Olive is being published 23rd July!

Olive, a 30 something city slicker, with an inner dialog to die for. Recently single she has some stark choices ahead but with her firm friends beside her, these don't seem quite so difficult. Intense in places with a touch of Eat. Pray. Love. A novel of our times.

I really enjoyed this! So good to read a book about a character not wanting children and show it as a fully dimensional issue, including the different forms of pressure experienced by women who decide not to become mothers. Olive's a great lead who I rooted for the whole way. I'd recommend this for fans of The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary and Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan.

Olive is relatable and engaging. What's lovely about this book is we are Olive, in some manner we have all or will go through the things she does and this is why the it's is so well written by Emma Gannon and lovely to read.

I’d already read Emma Gannon’s The Multi-Hyphen Method, and followed her work from the early days of the “Girl Lost in City” blog, so I was interested to see what her first novel, Olive, would be like. The story is told from the perspective of Olive, a millennial journalist living in London whose life is at crossroads. As her university friends settle down and start to have families, she realizes she’s “different”: she’s pretty sure she doesn’t want to have children. As their lives take different paths, tensions take hold, and Olive wonders what it is she really wants in life.

I really enjoyed this book for a number of reasons. One is that it felt really contemporary – it felt like life being lived right now (well, minus the lockdown, but you know what I mean!), with the characters sending WhatsApp group texts, going on Netflix binges, and mindlessly scrolling through social media. The second is that it examines an issue that is still quite taboo for a lot of people: the decision not to have children. And the third is that it was an excellent portrayal of female friendship, with all its up and downs, and the strength that the women in the book get from those friendships despite the pressures of their lives going in different directions. I'd definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys contemporary fiction, with a focus on female friendship.

I cannot believe this is a debut novel. This has been a great read and I have absolutely loved it.
I have devoured this book in just hours this afternoon. I highly recommend this book.

Childfree Olive is adrift in a sea of her best friends – and a society – obsessed with motherhood. As she turned into a thirty-something, the questions only became more insistent – talk of shrivelling up eggs and the perils of geriatric motherhood. Olive has never wanted children, and she’s not going to ‘change her mind.’ But she finds it increasingly difficult to navigate this decision and reconcile it with society’s expectations of womanhood and the life choices of her own best friends.

‘When I am an adult, I would think, everything will be good. I will finally be free. Adulthood = freedom.’

It is the tight-knit bonds of friendship, rather than romance, that are at the heart of the book. Emma Gannon explores the exuberance of female friendship, with flashbacks to their heady university days and teenagerhood, contrasted with their early thirties and how their life paths have diverged. Their sacred rituals – dinner at the same London restaurant every month, a holiday abroad each year – are slowly slipping away from them.

‘Everyone has just seemed slightly less available, a creeping sense of business and life admin and to-do lists, of time being squeezed.’

Despite the sometimes heavy subject matter, Olive is an easy and accessible read, with levity, humour, and self-awareness.

‘I’ve decided to go and see a Reiki healer because I am a Millennial cliché with a free afternoon.’

Although plot elements are at times predictable and a little hackneyed, the strength of the novel lies in portraying nuanced protagonists who each have their own struggles when it comes to motherhood – be that infertility, post-natal depression, juggling three children or having no desire to have kids – and explores these choices in an open and honest way. Gannon draws sympathetic characters and lets us into their heads. It’s a perspective I’ve not read about before in such a clear-eyed way, and I think this will resonate with many women at a similar crossroads in their life.

I really struggled with this novel, Emma Gannon’s fiction debut. Olive is a successful 30 something with a job she loves and great group of friends, but her long term relationship has just ended- because Olive is starting to realise she just doesn’t want a family. With one best friend a mum of 3, one about to pop and one going through heartbreaking fertility treatment, she is finding it hard to confide in anyone about her secret feelings.
My main issue with this novel was that I really didn’t like any of the characters. Olive’s friends came across as selfish and unsupportive, and for long term best friends, they don’t actually seem to like each other very much. As for Olive herself, I didn’t think she had much of a personality and I just wasn’t that invested in her story.
It’s a shame because I think it’s such an interesting concept for a novel, but I wasn’t convinced by the end result.
Thanks to Netgalley and Harper Collins for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review

Olive was an amazing novel. I loved every word, and I found it so beautifully relatable. Olive is our main character and she does not want children. Nada. Never. Surrounded by her friends, one heavily pregnant, one with a large family and one struggling to conceive, it's only natural that she would feel like an outcast, even within a group of her closest friends. It's so hard to find characters, especially women, in literature that portray such a strong childfree message. Reading Olive's struggles to understand herself and believe that nothing is wrong with her is so empowering, especially accompanied by her attempts to understand her friends and the people around her, and why they feel the way they do. This is also ultimately a story about the power of friendship, and how even if people's lives may differ, there is so much that holds us together. A truly great feminist girl power friendship read!

I picked up this novel because I wanted something quite light as a distraction from current (apocalyptic) events and while all the classic elements of a romantic comedy were there, Gannon’s book actually covers some quite powerful and thought-provoking topics around personal choices on motherhood and friendship. So while I didn’t quite get the escape that I wanted, at least I could be distracted by other people’s worries, and with a well-written and gripping novel. There are a few clunky bits, however, like an “as you know” (a very literal example of the old “as you know, Bob” syndrome) being said to friends in the afterword, giving the reader information that we know the friends already know in an inelegant way. This wasn’t enough to ruin my enjoyment of the book, but it did take my attention away slightly.

Olive ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

An absolutely charming contemporary read.

This book touches on the subjects of friendship, loss, fertility, marriage and the pressures as women that society can enforce.

Olive is a 33 year old female with a great job, she knows her own mind and knows that she does not and will not want children. This is the cause of her recent break up from her longtime boyfriend. Not having the maternal urge is something others in her life are finding hard to grasp. Bea, Isla and Cec are Olive's closest and longest friends. All battling with their own troubles and turmoil.

Emma Gannon does a fantastic job with the character of Olive. I've never seen a character like Olive before within a book. It was a breath of fresh air. No cliches here.

Motherhood is such a complex subject to approach. With many people having very strong views. Emma Gannon does a remarkable job to tackle it, looking at every aspect of the argument. Why should a woman feel guilt for not wanting a child? But why should a woman for guilt for longing for a child?

A character driven tale about reaching the crossroads in your life 💕

Olive is charming. Telling the tale of the titular Olive, it promises to explore what happens when a woman in her thirties decides to go against the societal norm of settling down and, importantly, having children. What does it mean, she wonders, to seek an alternate way of living?

Hearing reviews likening it to the work of Marian Keyes, I expected a novel of warmth, humour, and charm, while puzzling questions of our time. What I wasn’t expecting was such a vivid and varied depiction of womanhood.
Gannon depicts female friendship with warmth, and intimacy, revealing the grey-areas and the complexities of choosing a life on a different path to that of your friends. In depicting what it might mean to not want children, Emma Gannon also vividly depicts what it’s like to choose the more accepted path of motherhood – this is a ‘default’ option which is no easier for women.

Thoroughly recommended!

Brb, now going to recommend this to all my gal pals! 📖

Olive lives in London and is a successful writer, and dealing with the heartache of splitting up with her long term boyfriend as he wanted to start a family but she doesn't. Olive's friends are announcing pregnancies, her insta feed is full of "I said yes!" pics and she's asked at every party if she's next. Her best friends are on different paths, but she must figure out her own and if she was right to the end her relationship.

Motherhood, marriage, family, pregnancy.. are different for each person and that's what this book does a brilliant job of highlighting and exploring. I'd recommend it to all my gal pals as it's relatable, fun, whilst also a comforting read when you are at the stage of life of figuring out what we want and how to get there. I loved the angles that each friend brung to the story and seeing how their lives spanned out over time. Finishing this read also makes me want to call all my friends for a check-in and gives a new wave of appreciation for the friends that are doing amazing jobs of being mummas! ❤️

I'd now love a spin off story about Dorothy, Olive's elderly neighbour who calls Olive her friend and has a rich past of fashion designing for the best in the biz!

Thanks to Netgalley for the preview of this book. It was a fantastic read. Olive is such an easy character to care about & identify with. The issues she deals with in this book are so common & rarely dealt with in such a sensitive & realistic manner. I loved it & hope Olive comes back again!

Sometimes, once in a blue moon as if by magic, a book comes along unexpectedly yet exactly when you need it. That was this book for me, I devoured it in a single day during this week. It's simply wonderful. Ol's perspective is one that feels something of a rarity in contemporary literature - a woman in her early 30s who is adamant she doesn't want children. Her friendships with her friends are wonderfully rendered - their love, the highs and the lows of it, are at the forefront. Romantic relationships do inevitably play a part, but they are not the sole focus, which is truly refreshing. The narrative jumps to flashbacks and memories, a fantastic use of form to enhance the potency of the present day proceedings. All in all, this is truly faultless book that will certainly be one of my favourites of the year.