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.

A group of uni friends reunite after decades apart at an engagement party. This sets off a chain of events that will change each persons life over the coming year, with, you guessed it, births, deaths and marriages.

I requested this book after reading the blurb and I was hoping for a literary Four Weddings and a Funeral vibe.
I’m not entirely sure that’s what I got. Though the book kept me interested, I found the pace a bit slow for my liking. The characters are varied and nuanced but not entirely likeable, or at least, I didn’t really root for any of them, which I think affected my enjoyment of the book.

If you are looking for a character driven rather than plot driven book, it would be worth checking out this book. Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for change to review an advanced copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

A story about university friends who originally meet a funeral. The slow and sluggish writing failed to connect me with the narrative, though the characters were well rounded and believable.

A 5 star rating from me.

After university six friends who had lived together and become very close went their separate ways. Zoe and Rob who had paired up while at university, married and had a son, Gabe. Rob left Zoe and had a string of failed relationships. Zoe returned home and trained to be a community midwife. Al, widowed going, started working with his dad in the family funeral business. Indie set up her own business and married. Yas became a consultant surgeon and Rachel a stay at home mum.

The friends are thrown together when Rob invites them to his engagement party. Old connections and resentments are rekindled. Over the next 12 months there will be a birth, death and marriage.

You see events from the viewpoint of each of the friends as each deal with the hand they have been dealt.

A novel about friendship, relationships, growing older and ultimately about hope.

A lovely read.

I found this book quite slow and for me, it was ok.

The backdrop of the story is the lives of a group of university friends who stay in touch throughout their lives. We hear the back story to each person and their thoughts and views on each others lives. I think the fact that I had no connection with any of the characters made it very difficult to stay connected with the book.

There were some amusing and very poignant and sad moments but it’s just not for me

Overall I enjoyed this book. I did find some of the characters hard to connect with and some of the story jumped around a bit for my liking. I think I was expecting it to be more humorous. It is very much a modern day 'this life'. Some parts were also quite tragic. Still, I completed the book quite quickly. It just wasn't what I was expecting.

I so wanted to enjoy this novel more than I did. 6 friends who meet at a funeral and continue through life keeping in touch sporadically.
There are lots of characters introduced fairly quickly and then added too, this made it hard for me to concentrate. I think I would have preferred it more if each chapter was 1 persons point of view rather than numerous
However I enjoyed that each person had their own foibles and concerns that felt very realistic.

I really wanted to like this, but unfortunately it just didn’t work for me. The premise had potential—old university friends reconnecting over a year of major life events—but I found it hard to connect with the characters and struggled with the pacing. The narrative jumped between perspectives in a way that felt disjointed, and I nearly DNF’d a few times. It felt like it was trying to say something profound about friendship and adulthood, but never quite got there for me.

This is basically a mash-up of Friends and Four Weddings and a Funeral but without the laughs. Not necessarily a bad thing, I guess.

It’s also like finding out what happened to that clique of university chums you didn’t know that well, as we follow a year in the lives of four women – Zoe, Rachel, Yas and Indie – and two men – Al and Rob. Irregular friends, and occasional enemies since their time in an unnamed London university, a wedding draws then all back together again, but now with children, partners and baggage.

Barnett deftly slips into the minds and lives of each of her characters, splitting into chapters for each one of our six and, occasionally, they overlap, meet up and part. Their stories take them out of London to New York, Beirut, Lisbon, Sardinia.Inevitably, some characters are less interesting than others but, like an episode of Friends, you soon get a chance to spend more time with the character you like best.

And, as the title suggests, all the big events of life are here but it is on the subject of marriage that Barnett excels – how they begin, how they end, the huge leap of faith involved even in embarking on it in the first place.

A moving read that draws you in but, just like actual friends, a little bit annoying at times.

I havent read a laura barnett book before i have to admirlt i struggled with this book a few too many characters for me to follow and i just couldnt relate or feel for them in anyway...

I have been waiting (im)patiently for a new Laura Barnett and was thrilled to read Births, Deaths and Marriages. This is a reflective novel centered around a group of friends who meet at University in the early noughties, and now, as they reach their forties, they are all at very different places in their lives, but still united by the deep friendships they forged back then.

It is a beautiful novel that examines relationships, both in terms of friendship and romantic, the ebbs and flows of life, grief and parenthood. I am a similar age to the characters in the book, and recognised lots of the themes explored, especially the sense that we are halfway through our life, and how do we want the remainder to look?

The writing is beautiful and the depiction of friendship, especially University friendships where you can go years between seeing or talking yet when you meet it is like you saw each other yesterday. If I had one tiny criticism, it would be that the characters were around my age but felt much older. I had to keep reminding myself that they were late 30s/early 40s as, at times, they felt a decade or so older. This didn't detract from my enjoyment of the book though, I have been squeezing in pages wherever I could, and adored the tone and writing.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, Barnett has written a book focusing on a group of university friends. We meet them years later, during an eventful year, where all of their lives change.
Barnett has done a fantastic job with the characters, the sense of a longstanding friendship is very present and they were all very likeable and relatable.
The plot is good, slow in paces but there was always something to keep my interest. The events are relatively simple, Barnett captures everyday life but the characters are so likeable that the ordinary becomes extraordinary.
This was a truly enjoyable read.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House UK for an advance copy.

University friends who are still in eachothers lives.
Mainly meeting up for life's events. They intersect although life has taken them in many directions. Marriages, divorces, children and careers have changed who they are but the connection to each other still remains.
A multilayered story that I enjoyed and recognised myself and my friends in different characters.

This book is about a group of friends who lived together at uni. They were inseparable but have fallen out of touch but are reunited by weddings.
I found this book quite difficult to read, particularly the more it went on. The characters weren't that warm or likeable. There was a distance between the reader and the characters and I found I didn't really care about them.