Clara’s Verdict
Kate Forster’s The Perfect Retreat is the second book in her Perfect series, and it does exactly what a summer romance novel should: it takes you somewhere beautiful, gives you people you actually want to spend time with, and provides enough emotional texture to make you feel something beyond mere entertainment. It’s not reinventing the form, but it executes the form with considerable skill and genuine warmth. I’ve recommended it to several friends who needed something enjoyable rather than challenging, and all of them thanked me.
The Bristol countryside setting is a refreshing departure from the usual London or rural-idyll-unspecified backdrop of British romance, and Forster handles it with real affection. Rachael Tidd’s narration brings the right amount of British charm to proceedings without tipping into parody.
About the Audiobook
Willow Carruthers is an Oscar-winning actress who, as the story opens, is losing everything: her rock-star husband has been openly unfaithful, the banks are closing in on properties she can no longer afford, and her private heartbreak is being dissected by every tabloid in the country. Into this chaos comes Kitty Middlemist, Willow’s remarkably capable nanny and the person who quietly keeps the family functional – a woman with her own history, her own desires, and crucially, a crumbling ancestral home in the Bristol countryside that might offer everyone a way out.
What unfolds at Middlemist House is the kind of story Forster tells best: several women at various points of crisis discovering their own resources, complicated by the arrival of Kitty’s brother Merritt, who was not supposed to be part of the plan. There’s romance, obviously, but the novel is equally interested in friendship, motherhood, and what it means to start over when you’ve built your identity around something that’s fallen apart.
It sits at that intersection of commercial women’s fiction and romance that the publishing industry sometimes dismisses as “chick lit” – a term several reviewers have pushed back on, noting that the writing is considerably more accomplished than that label implies.
The Narration
Rachael Tidd narrates, and she handles the multiple perspectives with deft differentiation – Willow’s more guarded, public-facing voice and Kitty’s warmer, more grounded register are distinctly drawn without ever feeling like caricatures. The nearly ten-hour runtime passes easily, a testament to both the pacing of Forster’s prose and the fluency of Tidd’s delivery.
The comic moments land well, and the emotional beats – particularly around Willow’s autistic son and the complexity of single motherhood – are handled with genuine care rather than sentimentality.
What Readers Say
With a rating of 4.4 from three listeners, the sample is small but consistent. One reader called it “another great read” and praised the unpredictability of a plot that “somehow seems different” from other romance reads. Another, who described herself as sceptical of the genre, admitted she “found herself staying up late to race through it” and called it “really difficult to put down.” A third praised the “vivid descriptions of settings and locations” and “sharp wit and humour” that lifted it above the obvious comparisons.
Even the more measured review – from a reader who found it “your typical rom com” on first impressions – ended up pleasantly surprised by characters she could “relate to and feel for” and a story that proved more unpredictable than expected.
Who Should Listen?
This is ideal for listeners who enjoy contemporary British romance with a bit of substance – the kind of book that takes its characters’ emotional lives seriously without being heavy-handed about it. If you liked Jojo Moyes’s quieter, domestic-drama work or found something to admire in Marian Keyes even when you couldn’t quite admit it, this is very much in that company.
It’s a superb holiday listen – long enough to fill a few beach afternoons, warm enough to be genuinely uplifting, and well-crafted enough that you won’t feel you’ve wasted your time. If you enjoy it, the broader Perfect series is worth exploring.
Listen on Audible UK: Get The Perfect Retreat on Audible. Also available on Kobo, Scribd, and Storytel.
