Friendship, Love, Life, & Everything In Between

The Day Our Lives Collided by Laura Pearson is a simply beautiful book set over a series of weddings from 2008 onwards. Three friends who met at Birmingham uni seventeen years earlier, share the celebrations over a number of years.

The action is told through three alternating points of view in the first person. The reader gets to know each character intimately.

We witness the highs and lows of life as we follow the wider group of friends down the years. Some are party animals; others are of a quieter nature.

We see rifts in lives. Some marriages make it; others don’t. And there is a funeral. “We couldn’t know… that one of our group would die within the year. If we’d known that, I wonder whether we would have done anything differently. Loved harder or lived more fully.” When death hits, there are always regrets. When death hits the young, it is tragic, especially if children are involved. True friends step in with a life-changing offer.

One character has a disabled sister who is in a wheelchair. “The first time they met… Tash spoke to her like she would anyone else… All too often people crouched down and spoke to Grace as if she were a little kid.” I can empathise as I used to work at the local high school and often worked with teens in wheelchairs – far too often people would speak over their heads to me, asking how the person was. I used to reply “they are sitting right here, why don’t you ask them.”