Clara’s Verdict
Sheila O’Flanagan has been one of the most dependable voices in contemporary Irish women’s fiction for over two decades, and Secrets Between Friends confirms that her instincts for the specific emotional terrain of middle-aged womanhood remain as sharp as ever. This is a novel about grief, friendship, and the secrets we keep not out of malice but out of self-preservation – and it handles all three with the warmth and structural intelligence that O’Flanagan’s readers will recognise and trust.
At nearly thirteen hours, narrated by Grainne Gillis, it is an immersive listen – the kind of audiobook you find yourself returning to during the commute not out of habit but out of genuine investment in what happens next to three women you’ve come to care about.
About the Audiobook
Three women – Ailie, Sybil, and Rua – meet by chance and form an unexpected friendship that becomes a lifeline as each navigates her own version of loss and reinvention. The novel moves between Ireland, Italy, and France, which gives it a pleasing geographical range and allows O’Flanagan to use landscape as emotional texture in a way she has always done well.
Ailie is recently widowed and struggling with her grief while managing a complicated situation with her late husband’s Italian family – made more difficult by the fact that her teenage daughter wants to spend time with them in Trieste. Should Ailie follow, and confront the family who can’t forgive her? Sybil has learned to live contentedly alone in her sixties, but her younger sister Tansy is determined to find her a partner before it’s supposedly too late, and has a candidate in mind. Rua has survived the worst life can offer, twice, and has built her current life around protecting her daughter – though the full story of her past is something she hasn’t yet shared, even with the people closest to her.
O’Flanagan threads these three storylines with evident craft, and the moments when the women’s separate histories intersect – when they discover what they have in common – are genuinely moving. The novel also addresses grief with a sensitivity that several readers have specifically praised: O’Flanagan doesn’t simplify the experience or rush it towards resolution, and she is honest about the ways grief reshapes rather than simply diminishes.
The European settings – Dublin, Trieste, the south of France – are rendered with the specificity of a writer who knows these places rather than simply deploying them as backdrop. Ailie’s confrontation with Italy and her Italian in-laws carries the full weight of cultural difference and family obligation, and the scenes set in Trieste in particular have a quality of place that enriches the emotional story considerably.
The Narration
Grainne Gillis is ideally cast. Her voice carries the warmth that O’Flanagan’s prose demands, and she navigates the Irish, Italian, and French settings with an ease that never feels effortful. The three central characters are distinct in her reading – Rua’s carefully maintained composure, Sybil’s wry independence, Ailie’s rawer emotional state – and the supporting cast, including various family members and potential love interests, are handled without becoming caricature. Gillis has a particular gift for the moments of quiet female solidarity that the novel keeps returning to, and those moments are the book’s heart.
At nearly thirteen hours, Secrets Between Friends is a substantial listen, but the pacing is well-managed. O’Flanagan knows how to keep three parallel storylines moving without any one of them stalling, and Gillis’s narration maintains the forward momentum across all three. This is comfortable audiobook listening in the best sense: immersive without being demanding.
What Readers Say
Early UK listeners – several of them early readers with advance review copies – have responded with consistent warmth. One described it as “a warm, sensitive story about the power of female friendship, finding hope amidst the toughest times and the joy of second chances.” Another praised the way O’Flanagan writes about strong women facing problems that many readers will recognise from their own lives. A third highlighted the novel’s handling of grief as its greatest strength, specifically praising its approach to a difficult subplot around historical sexual violence – noting that it was handled with sensitivity to both the victim and the long-term impact on family members. The audiobook holds a rating of 4.6 out of 5.
Who Should Listen?
Readers of Marian Keyes, Cathy Kelly, and Patricia Scanlan – whose blurb adorns the cover of this book – will find exactly what they love here. It is also worth recommending to anyone navigating their own bereavement or a significant life transition: O’Flanagan’s ability to locate genuine hope within grief, without dismissing the grief itself, is a real skill, and this novel demonstrates it at its best. The European settings give the novel a pleasingly expansive feel that makes the emotional claustrophobia of certain characters’ situations all the more pointed.
Find Secrets Between Friends on Audible UK here: Listen on Audible UK
