! found this rather tedious. Esther, the central character, is recovering from the trauma of a miscarriage while facing the challenge of parenting in a collapsing marriage but I found it difficult to be sympathetic to her plight as she was so self-centred and self pitying. The other characters were all two dimensional and equally unsympathetic. Not sure why her family had to be Jewish since they were not apparently religiously observant or even identifying culturally. The title seemed to me to be quite irrelevant to the story, the Notre Dame fire was used as a rather clumsy metaphor. The conceit of telling the story through fragmentary letters to the unborn child, and to others, wore rather thin

I found this an overwhelmingly self-indulgent and introspective reflection on life from the point of view of the narrator, who spends her time reflecting on what has gone wrong in her life and her marriage, and it was all too much journaling and not enough telling for me, a disappointment really when the premise for the book was good. The character of Esther is completely self-obsessed to the exclusion of anyone else, and the characters of her husband and daughter don't even enter into the fray. Just didn't work for me.

What a great arc of a possible story.
Couple meet in romantic Paris under the shade of Notre Dame cathedral and years later in the destructive flames of the destructive fire at the cathedral their relationship reaches its final burnout.
Well the bit in the middle between beginning and end has to be the meat of this French sandwich and sadly it disappointed.
I really tried to engage with the characters - particularly the narrator - lover, wife and mother Esther. Her extreme awareness of self and particularly the loss of her child Noa Lynn which inspired her fictional writing was devastating as all such miscarriages are in personal lives of women.
The imagery was strong, sensual and emotive.
But the huge level of self indulgent psycho talk and blame just became too much in the narrative.
The husband Ravi had no particular voice beyond the criticisms and I also felt their surviving daughter/sister to Noa, Annie seemed not to be fully represented.
I do expect this will be a very popular read but it was not one for me.

I actually couldn’t believe this was a debut novel. Interspersed with a fabulous humour, this is the story of one woman’s life unravelling through a double heartbreak- the loss of her unborn baby and the end of her marriage due to her husbands betrayals, and how she emerges from this and endures. Really unique in how it is writtten- letters, memories and asides, this is a fabulous book.

a compelling and emotionally weighted book of a woman who seems to be dealing or trying to deal with alot of loss. this book is that lady trying to figure things out. asking the questions of herself and about her situation. she has a miscarriage and we feel all that comes with that. shes also asking the questions of where her marriage started to breakdown. and we get to read that journey. so often these little intricacies of peoples lives and thinking we dont see. its like reading someone diary. some things we can connect with and some things we can truly feel weve asked or wanted to know our self. and all in all its a really in deep book of this woman and what she is going through.
its not easy at times. and you have that feeling from books like this as if you are taking on some of the load which is such a skill to be able to do. and thats ok. it really gets you involved and caring about the characters.

I really struggled with this book and did not finish it. The author writes about her life and marriage to her deceased daughter. Perhaps I have read too many books where the husband has strayed and it is all his fault but this failed to engage me.

The set up of the novel is that the narrator named (or at least named by herself in this novel as) Esther is looking back across her marriage to her documentary filmmaker husband – Ravi in the novel (although that is the name she was mistakenly introduced to him as) who she first meets and first falls in love with in the English Language bookshop where she works opposite Notre Dame (“Shakespeare and Co” of course although not named”; later in the same bookshop and after failed attempts to save their marriage Ravi tweets from the roof of the same bookshop on a viral thread of tragic images he is filming and broadcasting to the world “Across from this spot where the flames burn now, my wife and I kissed for the first time. But things change: the years have passed; it is time to divorce. And Notre Dame is burning”.

What we are reading is the story of that marriage and its breakdown – of which the pivotal moment is a miscarriage Esther suffers just as the couple (and their young daughter Annie) relocate back to London from a temporary assignment in Zurich. In the aftermath of her loss as she bickers with Ravi over his seeming lack of support and care, the narrator discovers that Ravi has had an affair (and that over time he has had several).

The narrator was we learn trying to write a multi-generational part-family-biographical novel tracing from a 1920s portrait of two twin sisters – and part of what we are reading is built on the ruins of that novel. But what we are reading now is a mix of narrative and letters written by the narrator but not sent to: her never-born daughter who she names Noa Lynn; herself from the future when divorced writing to herself some years earlier while still with Ravi; the known and unknown women with who Ravi slept; Ravi and (at the novel’s end) Annie.

And over time we are told how the original novel and writing changes and morphs into what we are reading now via different versions (for example including one in which the Noa Lynn letters were addressed to Annie) although with elements of the original (in particularly some multigenerational family biography) remaining.

Cat Bohannan (the author is not named) and her inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction longlisted “Eve; How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Yeats of Human Evolution” is key to the novel: frequently referred to with the narrator drawing on the book to understand the concept of how female bodies have not just evolved but draw on the struggles and changes of previous generations (including literally via fetal DNA); the narrator and author (who as the novel points out look superficially similar) are confused for each other and later meet; the narrator names the women her husband has betrayed her with Eve and this leads to riffs on alternate Genesis creation myths and societal placement of guilt on females.

Other recurring themes and passages – which are threaded among the epistolary sections and limited narrative in a fragmentary, recurring way include:

Ravi’s documentary of a climate protest group which is pulled when one of the activists is arrested – which for me was a sign of his piece of art derailed by a transgression just like the narrator’s novel.

Some honesty and hugely resonant writing about miscarriage (and its emotional aftermath) which reminded me of Louisa Hall’s “Reproduction”.

Discussions with Ravi’s best friend – a philosopher/scientist on the nature and experience of time and how perspective leads to temporal ordering.

Ravi’s refusal to take on the narrator’s request to come clean about the full details of all his affairs – instead repeatedly trying to turn the discussion back to her inadequacies or failings (in some excellently rendered dialogues)

The mountain lion P-55 (which many literary fiction readers may know as the narrator of Henry Hoke’s “Open Throat”;

A small area of waste ground and marsh near Liverpool Street (I was reminded of Esher Kinsky’s “River”)

A scary encounter with the French police after the narrator inadvertently aids a counterfeiting scheme but where the memories revolve around her being asked accusingly “Vous connaissez cet homme” which in turn leads to ideas of what it means to know someone else, including in the biblical sense.

The narrator agonising over how much her open writing about her marriage and about motherhood will hinder or help her child (and her relationships with her) - “Look what they did to Rachel Cusk!” and later (in a page of its own) “Friends tell me Rachel Cusk and her children seem like they’re OK” we are told.

And these literary resonances – some intended by the author, some specific to this reader, are testament (if I can be excused my own biblical reference) to the way in which the very spaces which are key to the typography and pacing in this novel invite the reader to form associations.

Perhaps one of the key passages in the novel is when the narrator says “Betrayal is a palimpsest, An overwrite. It scrubs most of what was written on your parchment and emblazons a new story in its place, more important, more real and relevant than what was there before. Except little fragmented bits of the old story remain, if you look closely. The ghosts of the old, eradicated story haunt the new. Faint, emaciated fingers trying to grasp something they can’t quite hold.”- and this feels very much like a novel itself written across other works as well as one which is of course (by its very nature) fragments of the more conventional historical and family-biographical novel the narrator was going to write.

The extent to which the novel is autobiographical/autofictional/purely fictional is deliberately blurred and deliberately integral to the novel which is precisely about the question of what it means (particularly as a woman) to have one’s own story/understanding of one’s own life questioned, undermined and rewritten – and cleverly the novel ends with the narrator about to tell Annie (just before the novel is published) how much of it is true and how much pretend.

My review has I think only touched on this in many ways brief but highly impactful novel.

Highly recommended.

I adored this!

It follows a writer who is trying to understand how her marriage failed and you can feel her slowly turn it into a story. It’s told in fragments and in a knowing way that makes you relate to the narrator as well as keeping them at arms length.

There are so many descriptions and imagery that will stay with me for a long time. Sticking a buttered knife into a jam jar, or forgetting the joke but remembering the laugh are examples of such simple phrases that other books spend pages struggling to capture.

The use of telling some of the story though letters isn’t a new idea but somehow still feels fresh. She changes the grammar half way through or stops just short of saying what you expect so you feel it stronger.

This book is a masterpiece and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

This book deals with miscarriage and the trauma that comes with that, so will not be for everyone. It is very slow paced and at times very heavy and a lot to digest. It is written beautifully though, and I know it will have a profound impact on many people.

This is an emotional read telling the story of Esther.

When she suffers a miscarriage she sets herself a quest to find the answers to her life and her grief.

I loved this book . it is an intense slow read that I connected with immediately, I loved the dry humour that shone through and the stroytelling is modern and brilliant.

It is a book that will stay with me. Many of Esthers experiences are thing that I have gone thorugh myself so this book highlighted some issues that I still have to think about and what needs to heal.

When Esther miscarries, the grief and the worry about dashing Annie’s longing for a sister are complicated by the knowledge of her husband’s betrayal. Esther seeks answers and solace, turning to books, friends and a therapist but knows that she cannot forgive him until Ravi says he’s sorry, recording her struggles in what will become a book to be published five years after her loss.
That sounds quite straightforward but as Esther explains, she sometimes moves events to fit her own chronology having lost the sense of linear time. She delivers her story in a series of letters – most addressed to the child she miscarried, some to the women she feels invaded her life and her body thanks to Ravi’s infidelity, a few to herself and others, and one or two to Ravi – peppered with short observations. It’s an ambitious structure for a debut and I’m not entirely sure it works but it does fit the disordered, inward-looking mind of someone struggling with emotional turmoil. Miscarriage is a difficult subject and there are some visceral scenes which may well make very tough reading for some. I was in two minds about reading this one, and I still am, but I’ll be interested to see what Robinson does next.

And Notre Dame is Burning by Miriam Robinson captures a woman grieving for the loss of a baby and for her relationship with her husband and digging into her experiences of motherhood, of time, of being betrayed. I think readers of authors such as Rachel Cusk and Cat Bohannon would appreciate this.