A quick, entertaining. It deals with conflucts between different relationships. A good development of characters with the flashbacks of their lives I'm comparison to now.

In 'The Three of Us' Ore Agbaje-Williams allows us to experience the inner workings of a 'throuple' from three different perspectives over the course of a single day. The novel centres on the tensions between the unnamed 'husband' and his wife's 'best friend' Temi, who can't stand each other and both believe that the 'wife' really belongs to them. The husband wants to start a family with the wife and resents how much time Temi spends at their house and the influence she has on his wife. Temi still thinks that marriage is a phase that the wife will grow out of and that she will go back to living the same single, reckless life that Temi still enjoys. The wife feels attached to her husband and her best friend in different ways and wants to keep both happy. On this particular day, Temi visits the wife after she has been away on holiday for a month. The husband joins them later on and over the course of an alcohol-fuelled evening, many of these simmering tensions will rise to the surface.

This is a quick but entertaining read with some great insights into the conflicts between different relationships and the way that we like to think of certain people as being 'ours' even when others may beg to differ. There are some very amusing moments of pettiness and passive aggression in Temi and the husband's exchanges.
The combination of the short timespan over which the novel unfolds with flashbacks to earlier moments in their lives allows us to understand all three characters more fully.

None of the characters are all that likeable - in particular, I found their extreme wealth quite alienating, or perhaps more precisely their attitudes towards this: both Temi and the husband brag unashamedly about the "specific kind of life" which their money enables them to enjoy, and all three characters come across as deeply selfish and egotistical. I guess this is a key point of the novel - these characters who should be living a contented and carefree life still find ways to make themselves unhappy. I also felt that the novel could afford to push things a bit further, particularly in its final pages which had the potential to be even more explosive. Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable and absorbing comedy of manners which, as other reviews have noted, could work very well on stage. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

I was so glad I read this; it did not disappoint. Too many novels are too long so this was exactly right as the detail was sufficient but not over the top. This novel in three parts gives an intimate look at a marriage, love and friendship (and when they collide!). Giving the story from three viewpoints kept me engaged and wanting more, which I think is always a good sign.

When I read the blurb of this book, I knew it’d be a fun read. In this book set in a single day, told from three perspectives about a Nigerian wife, her husband and her best friend Temi who absolutely hate each other , we explore the simmering tension between the two and the wife who finds herself in the middle unfortunately. The writing is great, the concept too excellent and the simplicity of the book as a whole but honestly I didn’t even know who I wanted to strangle more between the 3 characters. I do not have anything against unlikeable characters however I just didn’t think there was enough substance and depth to sustain the characters. I liked the characters less as the story progressed. Just when I thought the story was getting interesting , we got * that end. I had started to make my own predictions and well I was really excited. It felt like the last pages of the book were ripped out. Like when you’re having a nice dream , and you wake up abruptly. Truly , an unsatisfying end. At the end, I found myself with a lot of unanswered questions, no closure and slight confusion.

However, it was a fun read and I do see myself reading future works from this author.

I read for enjoyment and let me start by saying I did not enjoy any aspect of this book.

When I requested The Three of Us I was drawn in by the premise. I love reading about relationships and friend dynamics, however in this books case, the idea was better than the execution!

These characters are awful, insufferable and entitled. They are ridiculously rich with no personality which is possibly the reason both the wife and husband remain nameless. Only best friend, Temi is allowed a name separating her from the couple. I'm not married but if this book is an acknowledgement of what it entails I'll happily avoid it. Don't even get me started on Temi, like girl get a hobby and grow up! Why she was so insistent on being involved in their marriage never really made sense and don't even get me started on the husband! That man needs therapy!;

The book is split into 3 parts which provides a voice for each of the three characters and believe me when I say it is REPETITIVE! I normally love multiple points of view but it did not work in this book. All it helped to do was annoy me further. The Three of Us is a short story of a mere 181 pages - it felt longer! Why the author decided to go against traditional speech marks is beyond me all it achieved was confusion and a slow reading pace.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book and if not a gifted arc I would have DNF'd.

I found the three points of view to be quite repetitive and with an abrupt ending, like if the author left it there and decided to never finish it properly. Maybe is on ourpose but it is not my cup of tea. Same about the writing style,I was so confused reading big chunks of text. The flow of this book, however, is quite good and the themes explored on the story are relatable.

A nice house, a carefree life, a doting husband, a best friend who never leaves your side. What more could you ask for? There's just one problem: your husband and best friend love you, but they hate each other.

Set over a single day, husband, wife and best friend Temi toe the lines of compromise and betrayal. Told in three parts, three people's lives, and their visions of themselves and one another begin to slowly unravel, until a startling discovery throws everyone's integrity into question.

Full of intrigue, idiosyncratic wit and a healthy dose of wealth and snobbery The Three of Us is part-suburban millennial comedy of manners and part-domestic noir that will leave you wondering: whose side are you on?

Whose side will you chose! Utterly gripping

Highly recommend

"She is probably the only person in my life who has never wanted something from me, only for me"

Grab onto your popcorn, pour a glass of wine and hang on to your seatbelts because ..WTF!!!!
ok let's start with a positive:
- The book was intriguing enough that I read until the end but that in itself ended up being a bad idea - it was like the author just couldn't make the deadline and said 'fuck it...send!'

I am convinced the initial idea was that this is the streaming consciousness of one person with multiple personality disorder and maybe the execution just ran away with itself?
I struggled with the structure; the only time speech marks were ever used was when the words 'I mean' we repeated 3 or 4 times on one page, there were no line breaks between different people talking and all three characters were merged together on each sentence (further deepening my suspicions). Beyond that though, it made it really difficult to consume.. I can imagine that it is all part of presenting the way the three of them have become so intertwined, but instead it just meant that I had to do a lot of work rereading parts to figure out who was saying what and in what context. It reminded me of year 7 essays...

Only the best friend Temi, had a name (the wife and husband aren't named once) and the relationship between the best friend and the wife is unbelievably questionable. There is gross level of disrespect, possession, control, domination and gaslighting that runs through all 3 parts of the book and at no point was it justified.
I really did want to love this one and I am so gutted that these have ended up being my final thoughts.
I just needed more of everything - more punctuation, more justification, more expansion, more of an ending.

A subtle art in manipulation!
You feel the strength of the bond between the female characters and the percieved threat to this bond. One throw away remark in an attempt to 'save', shifts the dynamics.
I couldn't decide whether I liked any of the characters, but felt compelled to continue reading because surely there was going to be a breaking point. I remain undecided about which of the characters I liked and yet Temi will always be the most memroble.
I think there needs to be a sequel!
Thanks NetGalley for an advance copy 😊

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC!

I was really looking forward to this book and unfortunately it fell flat. The writing was really repetitive, particularly the final section which could have been summed up in one page. The characters were unlikeable but not in a good way, the story went nowhere and I didn’t feel anything towards this book other than irritation.

I thought I was enjoying it at first but when the husband started talking about his motivation behind renovating the house I got so angry that I nearly threw my Kindle out the window. They kept bringing up how much money he has - if he was so desperate why not just move house?!?!

The ending was really disappointing too. The only reason I didn’t DNF this was because it was short.

I found the characters in this to be somewhat unlikeable, which did mar my enjoyment of the book. It was a very compelling read, but the ending lacked bite for me, because it didn’t bring any kind of conclusion.

Set over a single day, The Three of Us is told from three points of view: a wife, a husband and the best friend who has known the wife since school..

The unnamed wife hasn’t seen Temi for a month when she arrives, bottle of wine in hand, keen to catch up. Both women are from high achieving Nigerian families but the wife has chosen not to work. She’s been married for three years, ambivalent about having children, but her husband has persuaded her it’s time to start a family much to Temi’s disgust. When he joins the two women, tired and stressed from work, he and Temi edge closer and closer to a showdown as the wife anxiously looks on.

There’s a good deal of sly humour in the delivery of this story out of which no one comes covered in glory. The wife is the child of parents so strict she hardly knew what to do with herself when she went to university but now seems to have handed herself over to her husband who’s wrestling with Temi for her control. Her husband’s narrative is full of frustration at the ever present, sarcastic, judgemental Temi who doesn’t bother to hide her contempt for him or her eagerness to see an end to their marriage, something her own narrative makes clear she’s actively working towards. It’s very funny at times, although if you’re a reader who needs to like characters you might have trouble with this one. A clever debut, niftily handled, whose ending brought me up short.

I really liked the description of this book and was keen to read it as I love exploring dynamics in relationships and how one relationship can impact another.
However, whilst the idea was interesting and I was happy to read the book, it didn't hold me as the characters were lacking something to really like that would make me connect with them and it really felt like nothing much happened to move the plot on. Tension was built nicely between the characters but the extremes of Temi and her friend's husband made them unpleasant and the wife showed little strength of character with either of them. I appreciate that this is partly the point but whilst it was a decent read, I didn't love it as I wanted to.

Firstly… with friends like Temi, who needs enemies?!

I also found the wife’s obsession and blind admiration for her friend really jarring.

My favourite character was honestly the husband who seemed like a genuinely nice guy who wanted a peaceful marriage but ended up with a wife who loved him but not enough to be bold enough and confront her friend about constant berating her husband at every given opportunity. The entire friendship was toxic.

The story had a bit of a slow start but gripped me in more from the middle with suspense and a thriller like undertone. I was like “Oooo… it’s about to go down!!” and then… it was over.

I feel like the story ended before it really began. Just as I thought, this is really about to get interesting, it ended quite abruptly. I was left with a lot of questions. It was a unique theme with great potential but a few more chapters would have elevated it.

“I expected to live with one woman when I got married. Apparently I live with two”

...

The premise of this book seems straightforward, although I now believe it is anything but. We have a love triangle marriage, with three people in it, the husband and wife who remain unnamed throughout and the wife’s best friend who is called Temi. There are numerous added complications, probably the most pertinent of which right now, being that the husband’s sister is married to Temi’s brother and they have just announced that they are expecting a baby, which is of particular significance because the husband and Temi dislike each other intensely, which together with the fact that the husband and wife are also supposedly trying to start a family of their own, forms the crux of the storyline.

All of our protagonists and their extended families are of Nigerian descent, all wealthy, well educated, high employment achievers and mostly living the dream in London suburbia – complete in some perverse form of psychology, with their white maids. Whether they are financially independent or not, the mothers appear to control the purse strings and order the direction of their households, even down to ensuring that their daughters make good marriages, whilst their sons carry on the family name, thus making their future welfare the main focus.

Temi and the wife have been the best of friends since school, however, with the wife having only sisters as siblings, the pressure on her is not to carry on the family dynasty, but to make the best marriage possible, have a successful career, and procreate. In contrast, Temi has extremely wealthy parents, who both have financially lucrative and respected careers and who also have two sons, both training to be doctors, thus ensuring the good name of the family is upheld. Temi, who is actually very intelligent, is therefore to some extent, left pretty much to her own devices, without having the same pressures placed on her, as her friend, the wife.

Temi is the controlling and driving force in the relationship with her friend, she doesn’t want to settle down, has many partners and has always believed that she and the wife hold the same strong and independent views about women’s rights to independence. The wife, on the other hand, doesn’t work, is totally dependent on her husband, and the constant object of her mother’s derision, vitriolic words and thinly veiled barbs. The husband is certain there is a family history his wife has never opened up to him about, but he isn’t controversial enough to want to dig around and confront any issues, especially as his relationship with his wife is not all plain sailing right now, as he suspects his wish for them to become parents, is more than a little one-sided on his part.

The only thing the husband is definitely prone to showing signs of emotion about, is his hatred of Temi, for the influence he perceives she has over his wife, so when Temi, who has been notable by her absence from his home for the last few weeks, turns up unexpectedly and shows no signs of leaving, he is most displeased. When the two women are together they tend to drink to excess, which loosens tongues, especially as he also takes to the bottle when they gang up on him verbally. Today, whilst the wife popped out, Temi, who has her own key to their house, has been going around the rooms searching through cupboards and she believes she has found irrefutable proof that the wife has been lying to her husband about her desire to become pregnant. She now hopes to break them apart irrevocably, so that she and the wife can live their lives as freely as she believes they should and that this is also what, if she were truly honest with herself, the wife desires deep down.

The entire story begins, develops and might possibly reach a conclusion (although that is very much open to interpretation!), in just a single, hate fuelled day. Tensions have been bubbling away with ever increasing ferocity just below the surface, for some time now, in fact for the entire three years of the husband and wife’s marriage to be exact. Temi has chosen today to bring events to a head, especially when she discovers that the husband is trying to make his wife pregnant and she is not convinced that this is what her friend really wants, so she is out to cause as much mischief as possible, by confronting the husband with what she believes are the true facts of his wife’s duplicity.

...

In some respects, this storyline reminded me of the original 1970s stage play version of Abigail’s Party, for its conversational, monologuing style of presentation, with this relatively short storyline being divided into just three distinct chapters, each narrated solely in the voice of the wife, the husband and finally, Temi herself, depicting their individual perspectives on almost identical events. There are no speech marks and very little paragraphing, so you do need your wits about you to concentrate on each and every word.

There is more going on than meets the eye in this household today and it is all in the multi-layered narrative, which is nicely textured and cleverly nuanced. There are, in fact, one or two moments of dark levity and amusement, in what is otherwise quite a dour and depressing few hours, with an atmosphere which becomes ever more tense and claustrophobic with each passing bottle of alcohol consumed.

A small cast of three characters, none of whom I could relate to, empathise with, or invest in, which I am in no doubt is exactly as the author intended, were completely unreliable, complex and both verbally and emotionally volatile.

The way that Temi and the husband vie for the wife’s attention and affections, is very disconcerting and tantamount to coercion and bullying in its ferocity. Each is almost forcing the wife to take sides and whilst the wife’s true colours possibly show when her friend is around, it might also be the case that she is emboldened by Temi’s overpowering personality, to show emotions and react in a way which she may later regret. It was also open to interpretation whether or not Temi, despite her open promiscuity with men, actually wanted more from the wife than simply friendship, and if in fact, the wife was also being groomed for a different role and was just too blind to see it, unless of course that was always the wife’s secret! In fact, I wasn’t certain that despite her protestations of independence and self-reliance, if it wasn’t Temi who was the most vulnerable and needy individual in this relationship.

For his part, the husband is as weak and boring as dishwater and needs a good kick up the backside. He needs to be much firmer with both women and tell them that when he comes home from work, it is time for Temi to leave. There are also no open conversations between husband and wife, which is putting more strain on their relationship, as neither really knows what the expectations of the other are, both in terms of their marriage, or as two individuals. He clearly works hard to keep her in the style to which she has become accustomed, but beyond that his communication skills seem very limited.

The wife is all sideways glances, smiles and giggles, which are completely meaningless and give neither Temi nor the husband any real idea of what is going on inside her head. It seems as though she is easily led by both of them, which for someone who has a university degree and is by no means silly, indicates to me that she is confused and in a bad place right now, totally open to suggestion. Does she really crave the independence which Temi so clearly wants for her, or would a marriage where there is an equal partnership be what she really yearns for?

With the exception of one short interlude, the entire sequence of events takes place in the home of the husband and wife, which we know is quite lavish and undergoing renovations following one of Temi’s more notorious stunts to outwit the husband. So no journey to take, or scenery to explore, if you like your reading to cater for your ‘armchair traveller’ yearnings. But, Oh! what secrets those four walls know, if only they could talk!

The story was coming together very nicely, with the tension between our three protagonists building to a juicy, bitter and almost certainly acrimonious crescendo. I had started to make my own predictions about the eventual outcome, of which there were several scenarios, none of which were destined to end well – when Bam! I turned the page only to discover the ‘acknowledgements’ section staring me in the face, leaving me to speculate to my hearts content! Some stories can still work without that neatly packaged conclusion, but I really felt that this wasn’t one of them, as there were simply too many versions of the truth and subsequent endgames left floating around in the ether.

As I have often commented, shorter stories are not usually one of my preferred genres unless they meet a strict three part format – A good solid beginning, a strong storyline and a definitive ending. However, recently I have been honoured to have been invited to read a few stellar examples in the realm of short stories / novellas, so I had no hesitation in accepting The Three Of Us for review. However, whilst this was a well written 4* storyline, just two of my own criteria were met, which unfortunately led to a 3* ending. I have rounded this back up to 4* for review site purposes, although for myself, closure on this strangest of days would have made for a more satisfying experience. There are definitely more questions than answers – maybe too many!

"The Three of Us" by Ore Agbaje-Williams is a moving and heartfelt memoir that explores the complex relationships between family members and the challenges of navigating life as a black woman in the UK.

The book is primarily a tribute to the author's mother and grandmother, two strong and resilient women who played significant roles in her life. Through a series of vignettes, Agbaje-Williams offers readers glimpses into her childhood and her relationships with these two women, as well as her experiences with racism, mental health struggles, and personal growth.

The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams is a highly addictive and riveting read that will have everyone talking. A sophisticated story of intrigue, sacrifice, and love set over the course of one day, three compelling characters and their tumultuous relationship to each other is at the centre of this masterful debut.

At its heart, this book is a roller coaster ride between the three central characters; the wife, husband and best friend. Each of their stories unfold differently and contribute to the complex plot in various ways. The plot takes unexpected twists and turns and introduces readers to the unpredictable power struggles between these three individuals as well as the love, pain, betrayal and self-discovery they all go through.

Fans of books such as My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, and I May Destroy You will find themselves falling for the wonderfully eccentric wit and dialogue found in The Three of Us. It is an emotionally raw and heart-wrenching novel that deserves a place on every bookshelf. Don’t miss this spectacular debut – The Three of Us will not disappoint.

This was an enjoyable read about the nature of friendships and marriage. I enjoyed the writing style and loved the ending leaving things a bit uncertain. Unfortunately I struggled to connect with the characters a little bit and got bored because the whole book was just centred around one day. That being said, the humour was great and was really what kept me going! If you enjoy character driven books I think you’ll enjoy this one.

This was a well written story and has some lovely observational elements of human behaviour, but I struggled to feel that I was engaging with the characters. I neither liked or disliked them, found the three of them a bit meh. Admittedly I do prefer books where more happens to the characters and I can see who some people would love this book, but it was not for me.

Thanks Netgalley for the eARC.

I finished this book and just felt something was missing. Although the uncertainty at the end was something I enjoyed, I feel the book was overall lacking. I think this could be really great as a short story but as a novel I just don’t think it works.
There are also no quotation marks around speech and whilst I understand why some authors choose not to use them, it really isn’t for me. 2 stars overall, not a bad book but not for my taste.