The Love of My Life
Emma Bigelow is a marine biologist, a wife, a mother, and the love of Leo Philber's life. She is also dying. Leo, an obituary writer at a London newspaper, begins drafting Emma's obituary as a private way of processing what is coming, and almost immediately discovers that the woman he has loved for ten years has been telling him a different version of her life since the day they met. Wrong birthplace, wrong family, wrong name. As Emma's body fails and Leo's research deepens, Rosie Walsh moves between his bewildered present-tense investigation and Emma's own account of who she used to be, why she ran, and what she was protecting. Walsh's sixth novel is a domestic suspense story that uses the conventions of the thriller to ask a quieter question, about the difference between the truth of a marriage and the facts of one, and about how much of a person you can love when you do not know their real name.
Themes & atmosphere
Books in conversation with The Love of My Life
A few of the closest reads from our full list.
What you might want to know about The Love of My Life
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
When his marine biologist wife Emma is told her cancer has come back, obituary writer Leo Philber starts the draft early so it will be ready. Old fact-checking habit puts him on her childhood addresses and old jobs, where almost nothing about Emma's past checks out the way he thought.
The Love of My Life was written by Rosie Walsh and published in 2022. Walsh is also the author of Ghosted (2018), which was a New York Times bestseller.
The Love of My Life blends literary romance with psychological thriller elements, with mounting unease about a wife's hidden past. It is closer to literary suspense than full-genre thriller.
The Love of My Life is 384 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Love of My Life takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The Love of My Life is a standalone novel by Rosie Walsh, not part of a series.
The Love of My Life is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.