Fifty Days by Sarah Quigley

Fifty Days

Sarah Quigley

Quite a difficult book to review as I feel so emotionally wrought after reading it! The two central characters are very real – their lives are brought together for just fifty days, when secrets and lives are shared and deeper secrets not. The women are polar opposites, yet their lives echo one another’s in many different ways. It is only at the very end of the book when the true significance of the fifty days is shared with the reader resulting in an ending which is both incredibly uplifting and immensely downbeat.

Extract
Let us start with Candy Girl. We already know how she gets to work ... but what we don’t know about her is that she is easy company, immensely easy to be with, although the twenty years of her life have been far from easy. Her skin testifies this. Small round red marks on her forearms, legacy of her cigarette-smoking father ....
And what of Gest? You might assume looking at her and her beauty that she has not always lived alone. If you look at her apartment high above the tops of the grimy city trees, you would deduce that she has not lived here so long either.
Parallels
  • Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler
  • Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock