A tale about frienship, love, lust, joy, and sadness spanning over two decades. I could not reallyrelate to the characters, and it took mw a while to finish it.....I don't think that I am the target demographic

As a millennial, halfway between leaving university and entering my 40’s, this novel hit me like a freight train.
A hugely enjoyable read - funny, poignant, heartbreaking. The characters feel so beautifully realised, honest and fleshed out with flaws and foibles that make you want the best (or the worst) for them. Novels where the people feel like real people are often hard to come by these days, but Laura Barnett has done a sterling job - I can’t wait to read her next work!

The best way i can describe this book is like a cross between four weddings and a funeral and one day. It's packed with relatable characters, relationships that we've all genuinely experienced over the years whether it's friendship or love. Deeply enduring and moving I'd definitely recommend. Thanks to Doubleday, Laura Barnett and NetGalley for the ARC.

Six friends first meet up in UNI and drift apart to be brought together for an engagement party where they rekindle friendship and loves.
The story was very disjointed to me, I didn`t know who was talking and what year it was as it has past and present and changed all the time so very confusing.
Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC and I give my honest review.

I wasn’t quite sure with this one - took me a while to get in to the story , but I am so glad that I persevered.
6 friends, who met at uni, and drifted apart, but eventually got together as a group 20 years later. Each one of them had a story to tell, some good, some not so. Made me laugh out loud and also brought a tear to my eyes on more than one occasion.

One of my favourite books this year and would make a great film or tv series.

6 university friends, all gone their separate ways but have kept in touch. Births, deaths and marriages covers their lives in uni and afterwards. A really good read to curl up with, whether on holiday or a wet day. "Cold Feet" in print - but better.

Take six friends who met at university and stayed friends ever since – this is their story. They’ve shared all manner of life events, secrets, passions, desires – openly and not so openly – and while the force of their friendship has perhaps lessened, an engagement party throws them back together once more. Life hasn’t gone according to the grand plans imagined 20 years previously but they’re muddling through. When united, however, will old tensions come to the surface? Is now the time to resolve those situations from decades past? Over the next year there’ll be three significant events – but we’ll let the reader enjoy those. There’ll be a lot of head nodding as you read this, and it will bring you back to house sharing with friends and memories of being a student and feeling invincible.

Thank you to NetGalley, Random House UK, and Laura Barnett for the advanced copy of Births, Deaths and Marriages in exchange for an honest review.

The biggest letdown for me was that the book was just boring. I didn't connect with any of the characters and just really did not care about any of the plotlines. I think it was well-written, but I feel as though it was meant to come across more poignant than it did. Whatever message there was supposed to be fell flat, and everything felt very surface-level.

I've seen a decent amount of positive reviews, so it is likely this just wasn't my cup of tea.

Births, Deaths and Marriages publishes 12 June 2025.

We initially meet the six main characters in this book as teenagers at university. Then again 20 years later when Rob becomes engaged. From there over 12 months several life events happen that throw the characters together again and we hear how they each experience these events. I'm afraid I really struggled with this book. I really liked what I'd read in the blurb and the front cover definitely appealed to me. However, when I started to read the book it just didn't live up to its promises for me. I found the writing very disjointed. I didn't feel I was given enough information about a character to get to know them sufficiently before I was expected to
care about what happened to them.
Not a book for me I'm afraid but I'm sure it will gel perfectly with someone else's experiences and they will love it.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy. All opinions are my own.

A new author for me. This is the story of six university friends in the year of their 40th birthdays. Told from the multiple perspectives of the six main characters, it covers births, deaths and marriages and most other events from their interlinked pasts. Character driven with an almost complete absence of plot they are easily recognisable types and situations in UK society.

Six university friends with very different lives reunite in the year of their 40th birthdays. The story moves between time periods and the points of view of the individual characters, and interweaves a tale of life, love and friendship.

At times, sad, at times amusing, but always well paced and well written. The author shows how just because a group of people end up together at university, their lives are totally different, and people move on in different ways. I really liked the mix of characters and the way the story has them all interacting.

I liked how this novel depicts friends of people that are my age as there were storylines and vibes that I could relate to.

I liked the twist on the contemporary genre as it mean there was an element of mystery in finding out what was going to happen to each character. The characters were messy, flawed and imperfect and that was interesting to read about. The book itself is a unique concept.

The book was well written and language was not overdone and it suited the genre.

There are trigger warnings for this book. But overall through it was a very honest piece of work that was executed well.

Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday for the ARC

This is a character-driven, nuanced story that explores how closely our lives can be intertwined.

At the start of the book, we meet six old university friends, who have been thrown back together at one of their engagement parties. We quickly settle into a brief history of the group - secret passions, outright relationships and where they're at now.

From there, the book spans the course of one year, where there will be a birth, a death and a marriage - but who's?

This book is highly character-driven, flickering between characters, with sometimes multiple POVs within a chapter. This can make it at times, difficult to follow. The pacing is slow, as we follow the friends through their lives.

A very realistic portrayal of friendship, which deals with some themes of grief and loss, capturing the challenges of lifelong relationships.

If you enjoyed Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors, I think you will enjoy this.

Laura Barnett’s Births, Deaths and Marriages is a beautifully crafted novel that follows six university friends—Zoe, Al, Rachel, Rob, Yas, and Indie—as they navigate the twists and turns of adulthood in the lead-up to their 40th birthdays.

What makes this book so compelling is how each major event, a birth, a marriage, and a death, is not just experienced in isolation but reflected through the eyes of their oldest friends. Laura Barnett masterfully captures the complexities of long-standing friendships, the way perspectives shift, relationships evolve, and the bonds that once felt unbreakable are tested by the challenges of life and conversely those friendships that weren't the strongest are made by empathy and experience.

There are moments of laughter, nostalgia, and deep emotional truths, making it a novel that resonates. As the group reunites and old tensions rise to the surface, Laura Barnett offers an insightful exploration of how friendships adapt under the weight of time and shared history.

If you love stories that celebrate the messy, beautiful evolution of lifelong connections, Births, Deaths and Marriages is a must-read.

Births, Deaths and Marriages has (perhaps inevitably, given the title) been compared to Four Weddings and a Funeral, and I can certainly see where the comparison lies. Following six friends from university to middle age, through the big life events such as parenthood, grief, and divorce, I enjoyed this and enjoyed getting to know the characters. In fact, my one complaint is that the reader didn't quite have time to get to know them at the start before we were plunged into their future, which sometimes made it hard to entirely connect with them. The strongest parts of the book, I felt, were the reckonings with death - especially when mediated through Al's work as a funeral director.

Births, Deaths and Marriages will appeal to fans Barnett's previous work, and it also reminded me somewhat of Lisa Jewell's early, pre-thriller, novels

I loved this book! Funny, heartbreaking, so well written. I wished it would go on and on. I loved the six friends and their different characters and stories but that they all came back together when it mattered. A wonderful book I would fully recommend.

I've enjoyed other books by Laura Barnett better, I found this a bit forced, didn't really like the characters that much. It was pleasant but didn't grip me.

I found it impossible to warm to any of the main characters in Births, Deaths and Marriages by Laura Barnett. As a result, I did not enjoy the book.

This book took me a couple of chapters to get in to but then I couldn't put it down. I liked having the view from each character and it made me like the characters more.
It's like the title says Births, Deaths and Marriages a really good read. I would recommend

Sorry, I just can't get into this book. Got about halfway through and gave up. Can't see where this is going, lots of characters but I don't really feel strongly enough about them to continue reading.