Wife. Husband. Best friend. What if your two favourite people hated each other with a passion? Every once in a while a writer comes along and refreshes our notions of what fiction can do . . . Buy this book, and prepare to be blasted by the brilliance inside

This is a good read. It follows a wife and a husband (who unless i seriously missed it, remain unnamed) and the wife’s best friend Temi who is quite literally attached to the wife’s hip. This makes for a complicated situation because the husband and Temi don’t get on. In fact, that’s an understatement 💀 They loathe each other. Think constant digs and near-cruel remarks. You’d think this would leave the wife caught in the middle but not really? She seems to be solidly on Temi’s side always, only appeasing her husband where she can.
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It’s totally fascinating. Even more so because the entire story takes place in one day. It’s a hell of a day though and by the end, it’s just secrets and messiness and maybe a lesson in the price we pay for our friendships? As well as commentary on the place our friends have in our relationships?? That is if they have a place at all. I greatly look forward to people’s thoughts on this.!

The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams

A tale of a husband, a wife and a wife's best friend, told over the course of one day. Each takes a turn at narrating the story as resentments bubble to the surface and secrets are spilled.

I really enjoyed this story - it felt like a play in three acts, each led by one of the characters. The different perspectives are really compelling. Highly recommended.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book.

The summary looked so good for this book. It is a book told from three perspectives, a wife (who I gather is very early 20s), her husband, and her bff.
The book spans one day, but has some flashbacks.
The wife is such a bland character, who is being moulded/pushed at first by her best friend and then by her husband which leads to issues between the husband and bff, because they both are controlling AF.
Usually books have a protagonist, but this book has three antagonists.
It is a breezy read, but has too much repetition and not enough depth unfortunately.

This book was not what I was expecting, at all! The characters feel so real, I felt like I was watching a TV show rather than reading a book.
I disliked all of the characters yet I couldn't stop reading.

The one annoyance with this book was that it ended way too soon. I felt like it had just got going then it finished. A follow up is definitely needed.

This book is told in 3 parts, via 3 different character perspectives - spread over the course of one day and a whole lifetime. The focus is the push and pull of the relationship between one woman, her best friend and her husband. Safe to say the friend and husband have different ideas for her life, but who is pulling the strings?

For me, this book is a discussion on influence - what shapes you? How much do your friendships and relationship choices really alter your path? What do family/ culture/ heritage/ upbringing do to shape your dreams and hopes for you future self? Can others have influence to the point of manipulation? Where does trust start and end?

The characters are so well written that they feel real (& I actually quite disliked them all the way through for the way they treated each other, a real feeling towards fictional characters). The personalities were wholeheartedly there, and the only thing I would say is that I wanted more from the ending - an epilogue or a part 4 would have been perfect - what happened next?! Yes I’m greedy…..and totally invested!

The Three of Us is due to be published in May 2023 and is well worth your reading time. Thank you to Netgalley and Vintage Books for this ARC in exchange for an honest review

I adored this book. It is such a clever premise, and I love books like these that upend your notions with each change in perspective - it reminded me a bit of Lauren Groff’s wonderful Fates and Furies in that way. All of the characters are well-drawn and intriguing, particularly Temi - her bit was my favourite. .

This is so different from what I'm used to when reading books by Nigerian-British authors but I liked it. A lot. I loved the pacing, I enjoyed the dialogue and the style in which its written and I'm very fascinated by the characters. Also I wish the book was longer

I wanted to like this book, but there was something lacking for me. The story had so much potential, but it started to feel repetitive and prone to rambling at certain points.
The characters themselves lacked the depth that I craved - I wanted to care about them more but ended up rooting for no one. I love the idea, but the execution could use some work. Perhaps shorter/more succinct chapters.

I really enjoyed the clever building of tension in this novel through the use of multiple perspectives. For such a concise novel, I thought the characters were so expertly drawn & muliti-layered & both the tragic & comic elements were very beautifully written. Will definitely keep an eye out for the publication of this book! Thanks for letting me read!

The premise of 'The Three of Us' intrigued me: a woman's husband and best friend hate each other.

The story is told in three parts, with the wife, husband and best friend narrating each respectively. The writing is stark - in places, conversational. There is a lot of dialogue, but it is not set out conventionally, which means sometimes I got tangled with who was saying what. Nevertheless, I persisted and this was the right decision.

Towards the end of the husband's narration, we see him in the same room as his wife and the best friend. He trades words with the best friend - each word a weapon. The domestic setting, the dialogue reminds me of a play, Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' to be precise. Husband and wife host a dinner party and their marriage is served up and dissected. Things got much more interesting in the husband's section, and continued on in the best friend's account to the end.

It's not a pacy page-turner - the action starts too late for that. This is more a book of ideas, in the vein of Natasha Brown's 'Assembly'. It's about relationships and how people can be different to each person they relate to. It's about identity, cultural (British-Nigerian) expectations and how marriage can be a death of selves. It's about a different type of marriage. The book gave me a few things to think about.

This story and cast would come alive on stage. I hope it gets adapted into a play. Well done to Ore Agbaje-Williams.

Great novel exploring friendship and more.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publishers for letting me read this book in exchange for my review.

This was a quick and easy read that was crammed full of content for me to get my teeth into. I like the writing style and I thought the characters were well developed.

Loved this - modern, fresh, intelligent and witty portrait of 3 middle class / wealthy Nigerian millennials in London thrashing out the dynamics of their unintended 'throuple' over the course of a day. There is something of a play about this book - three acts, all tightly written, and three separate voices - I could really see it on stage working well. I highly enjoyed and related to the way each character expresses their vision for what their life was going to be like, and how their decision making is sometimes ambiguous / betrays desires they haven't yet admitted to themselves! I found this punchy tale original, well-written and at quite a pacy / short length, highly readable with an intriguing cliffhanger ending. Recommended - thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the opportunity to read.

What did I like about this book? The length - a quick read with plenty in it to leave me feeling satisfied. The ending. A bit of a cliff hanger I suppose, it in a good way. What didn’t I like? The characters, to a point. They were deliberately flawed and, by the end, left me wondering if they had just torn each other apart. What I loved. The image we were left with in the last line. Deliciously wicked!

Absolutely loved this sharply told, insightful and fresh-voiced story. I struggled to put it down, and when I did, I was constantly thinking about it, itching to pick it up again. The characters all felt completely real, the writing evocative and the wit caustically sharp. The way the author unwraps the story with her changing perspectives was masterful, all the voices being equally strong, compelling and sharply observational. An utterly brilliant insight into marriage, friendship and enmity. Agbaje-Williams is a talent to watch and I cannot wait to see more from her.

The set up of this book is relatively straightforward – a triangle of three people: wife, husband (both unnamed but a very well off London-based Nigerian-descended couple) and (the also well-off, London based Nigerian) wife’s best friend Temi, with the added complication of Temi being extremely close to the husband’s sister who is married to Temi’s brother.

Temi and the husband hate each other: Temi because she still cannot believe that her best friend (the wife) has effectively betrayed what she thought was a life long pledge to reject the domestic dreams of their parents and to live an independent life (BMFM – by myself and for myself) and instead stay as the closest of close friends; she seems to believe – or at least hope - that the whole marriage is a prank by her friend which got out of hand. The husband for the (at least to me entirely understandable) reason that Temi’s presence in their household is close to stalker like and seems based around systematically undermining his marriage – albeit its also clear that he has some fairly conventional and traditional expectations of the marriage and his and his wife’s roles in it.

The novel takes place over a single day. Temi who, as is her wont, comes over for a day of drinking and marriage wrecking is horrified to find that the husband and wife have been trying (for all of a) month or so to have a child so far unsuccessfully; the husband comes back part way through a stressful workday and resents Temi’s presence and both try to influence the wife in their favour.

It is written in three first party sections, with the wife, then the husband and then Temi taking turns to take over the narrative of the events of the day, while also looking back over incidents in the past (often with different perspectives on the same events). I did not think that the structure quite worked: for me both the husband and Temi had a pretty clear agenda and their sections serve largely to reinforce the impression we have of them from the other narrators. The more complex motivation is that of the wife, however with her section coming first we do not really get to the bottom of how she has permitted the situation to arise or how she feels when Temi and her husband try to engineer a crisis and so force her to a choice between them (both taking it largely for granted that she would chose them). Similarly in a book with unreliable (or at least slightly self-deluded) narrators I felt I needed someone with a more reasonable (and even believable) behaviour, as well as someone I could sympathise with – and in the absence of that in any of the three narrators I felt my investment in the novel rather unmoored.

Overall I think this is a book which might appeal to fans of “My Sister the Serial Killer” – but which was not for me.

Brilliant characterisation, great writing and good story. However, I hoped for more of a story. It's like you have the characters, you have the motivation, but not the action. We've set up the dynamic and intentions but then no follow-through, so it makes the story feel incomplete. All in all, it was a very quick and very good read.

With thanks to netgalley in exchange for an honest review. The three of us is a story that I wouldn't typically pick up in the bookshop. However I really enjoyed this book and learning more about the three people the wife the husband and the wife's best friend. At times I was thinking where was this going can i trust any of these characters. Very interesting read.

This is a messy little book told over the course of one day from the perspectives of a wife, a husband and the wife's best friend. The bestie and husband hate each other & have never really made that a secret. All three of them spend most of the day in the married couples house drinking too much wine. This builds up to a rather intense conclusion.

I imagine it to be the intention that each perspective makes you think the other two people are quite awful but the narrator we are currently with is not all that bad, actually.

A very quick read that I think will have people switching sides multiple times!

Thanks to NetGalley and Jonathan Cape for the opportunity to review this book!