Book review: Letters from Strangers by Susan Walter

I had no idea what to expect from Letters from Strangers by Susan Walter. I’ve read some of her thrillers and very much enjoyed them. This book was quite different but offered that same sense of surprise and a-ha! moment you come to expect from a thriller but there were no murders, and the mystery to be solved was more about past secrets and lies and long-smothered feelings. And this was a lovely read, I was swept up in everyone’s (connected) stories. The key characters are beautifully developed and complex, feeling very real and Walter addresses some issues that often go undiscussed. It certainly resonated with me for that reason.

Jane’s father is far from perfect. But his sudden death brings crushing grief. As Jane grapples with her pain, life delivers another blow ... a stack of letters pointing to a secret life. A life her father shared with another woman…who may have had his child.

Across the country, sixteen-year-old Adam is self-destructing. His adoptive parents never intended to show him the unsigned letters from his birth mother, but he is desperate for answers, even if they hurt.

Jane and Adam are on a collision course, but not for the reasons we might suspect. Because the letters do not tell the whole story. What is true is that Adam and Jane are both looking for a woman who does not want to be found.

The book is narrated by several characters and interspersed with letters. Old and new. We meet Jane, a chef who’s put work on hold to try to get pregnant and starting to worry as she’s in her mid 30s and none of the treatment she’s had has worked. Her brother is in the airforce and we learn he was close to his mother, while Jane idolised her father. The latter has just died as this book opens and Jane is packing up his old office when she comes across old letters and learns he had a long-term affair—which culminated in a pregnancy—decades earlier.

There’s Adam, a ranked high school tennis player before discovering football (gridiron to we Aussies given the multiple types of football that exist). The change in focus coincides with him deciding to bulk-up before going too far and being unable to stop eating.

And then there’s Ellie, who we hear from the least, and whose sister Jane believes was her father’s lover. As the letters reference her being pregnant and Jane is hoping to find their half-sibling, while trying to keep her father’s secrets from her mother.

As Jane revisits her teenage years she is forced to reflect on her own relationship with her father (and mother). We learn she was anorexic and in the present she ponders on the way she desperately tried to please her father, though was often the butt of his weight-related jokes. And she’s forced to accept that her childhood, and her parents relationship with each other and their children, wasn’t as she remembered. So this is very much about families, the legacies of our early years and how they impact on our lives if never truly confronted or accepted. Here, Jane and Adam act-out in ways available to them but also with some deliberate intent of self-harm—Jane by starving herself, Adam unable to stop himself overeating despite the way it makes him feel.

This was almost a rare five-star read for me, though a little disappointed on conclusion as it felt a little anticlimactic though perhaps Walters went with realism. Nevertheless I was held captive by these stories and the way they unfolded.

Letters from Strangers by Susan Walter was published by Lake Union Publishing.

I received an electronic copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.