Thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for an advance copy of this book in exchange for a review.

I loved being in Eadie's world - we are in 1999 during a car journey with her husband and we drift through her memories to her childhood and school days and university days in Manchester where Eadie and her friends frequent the Hacienda.

This was a real treat, I loved it.

We’re first introduced to Eadie as a 6 year old, where she is having a miserable time at at school as a victim of bullying
We watch as Eadie progresses through her school years with her two great pals, Josh & Celeste, to university and beyond.
We then see Eadie in her current life as a 30 year old with her husband
Eadie is such a wonderful character. Her early days at school were tough. She may have been an odd child with unusual parents but she didn’t deserve to be bullied
Loved her special relationship with Josh & Celeste, they were her protectors
It was quite melancholy at times, the consequences of the bullying could be felt throughout the whole novel.
A beautiful coming of age story - a life journey of friendship and belonging.
It’s heartbreaking and joyous all at the same time with plenty of nostalgia.
Get lost in Eadie’s world - reminding you in a nostalgic way what it’s like to be young.
Thanks @freya.north @welbeckpublish & @netgalley for the modern day classic.

Thank you to Netgalley for allowing me to read this book in return for an honest review. What an absolute treasure this book is! I was Eadie Browne while I was reading this story and I was fully immersed in it. I absolutely loved all the characters, the settings and the way the story brought me in as a character aswell. Absolutely loaded with nostalgia which I loved. Eadie was a blend of strength and fragility which made her so special for me. I highly recommend this book, it was beautifully written. 5 stars from me.

A very different book from what I was expecting. Eadie was an ‘odd’ girl amongst a ray of colourful characters but the story was a little slow for me.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in return for an honest review.

'Eadie Browne lives by the graveyard,' he told everyone, rolling his eyes as if I really wasn't worth talking about.' And her parents only come out at night.

This was one hundred per cent true.

And I really loathed that boy just then."

The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne is a story of friendship and identity, of a girl growing comfortable in her own skin. She is a bit of a misfit at school, unconventional. Eadie is mercilessly bullied by one of her classmates, Patrick Semple. His bullying means that she feels ashamed of her parents, and to cover for that she decides to make up some stories about her eccentric parents being spies.

"I didn't do it to gain friends - I had enough of those in the cemetary - I did it to win a reprieve from being the weird kid with the strange dimple who lived near the graveyard. I did it to keep Patrick at bay."

Eadie soon tires of having to keep up a pretence for her schoolmates as she feels she can't be herself around them. However, lucky for her she has Josh and Celeste who seem to love the real Eadie, the Eadie who feels at home among the unvisited graves and cemetary workers.

The three friends are inseperable and the book follows their journey into adulthood.

"Three sides of a triangle. Three magnets. One for all, all for one. Josh Albert. Celeste Walker. And Eadie Browne."

The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne is a dual timeline story. The second timeline is set in 1999 and follows Eadie and her husband driving home for a funeral. The journey is slightly uncomfortable because of she is travelling with her husband and all is not well in their marriage.

"My husband and I have been skirting around the issues and obstacles between us in a slalom of stuttering words and swallowed conversation that slip off the surface."

I loved Eadie's unconventional upbringing and her character in general. She sounds like a girl I would have wanted to be friends with, obsessed as I was with spooky things.

"My parents believed that our particular world of 41 Yew Lane and Parkwin Garden City Cemetary was a safe and beautiful place for me to roam and scamper and speak to strangers all by myself and, by the age of five I was doing precisely that. I had no brother or sister so I was to make friends where I could find them and the cemetary was an excellent location for this, whether they were walking and talking - or dead and buried."

The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne isn't just a light and fluffy book, there were plenty of scenes in it that had a depth. One of the scenes that stayed with me was the scene with was the scene where Patricks writes 'Yid' on Josh's arm.

The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne is classic Freya North in terms of the writing style. I loved it, it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling I am familiar with from her previous books. It is defintely a book I will read again.

This was a Freya one that I didn't particularly enjoy. I am sure others will love it. It was too slow for me and I didn't like the drawn out explanations of things.

For me this book was a slow burner. However, I loved the descriptions eg; “the motorway is ribboning ahead” and “Ross is playing Amazing Grace and it bubbles every nerve ending”.

I’m not sure if I enjoyed the ‘navel gazing’ of which there’s a lot. Also I felt quite depressed when reading this book, even through the happy parts, like when they are hiking in beautiful scenery or dancing with abandon in the Hacienda, I felt a hopelessness.
I will say again about the descriptions though as they are what made me keep reading until the end.

I was so excited when I was granted my first ever wish on netgalley and it was for Freya North’s new book!
I ADORED Eadie and all of her quirks. From her mad hair to her friends in the cemetery. The book switches from the present day in 1999 where we join Eadie and her husband on a car journey. During this journey Eadie takes us back to the 1970s and her life at primary school - the boy who made her life a living hell, and the two best friends who made everything better. Eadie is so beautifully written - we know so much about her yet so little about her and I love that at no point do we learn the colour of her hair, but we know there is occasionally vienetta in the freezer. We join Eadie as she navigates leaving primary school, leaving secondary school and eventually her small hometown to go to Manchester University. This was the era of the book I loved most. Late 80’s Manchester in the days of the Hacienda. Meeting new friends, finding a new home, revisiting ghosts from her past. It’s a book full of colourful characters, interesting topics and lots of emotions. Another brilliant book from Freya North.

Unfinished business. We all have some.

As delicately layered as the perfect mille-feuille, this beautiful coming-of-age story dazzles with its prose, perceptiveness, and unforgettable leading lady. It’s a tale of growing up, of finding one’s feet; of friendship, family and the meaning of home. It’s a familiar trope in literature but one Freya North captures with a rare and resonant poignancy.

Six-year-old Eadie Browne steals into your heart as soon as you meet her. Lonely and self-conscious, with a single dimple, crazy hair and odd ‘indoor parents’, she’s the weird kid in class, the one taunted by the bullies. Her ‘friends’ are the gravedigger, the funeral piper, and the people buried in the cemetery next door.

Fast forward twenty-odd years, and here’s grownup Eadie, driving down the motorway in a hire van with her husband, on their way to a funeral. Why a van and not a car? And who has died? We only get snippets of this journey throughout the book, but the atmosphere is thick with tension and unhappiness and keeps you hungry for an explanation.

We follow younger Eadie through her childhood, teens and eventual escape to university, where she experiences the heady thrill of freedom and independence, sloughs off the shackles of her youth and seeks to reinvent herself as the person she aspires to be.

North’s evocation of time and place — late 1980s, rave-scene Manchester — is bold and visceral. And this phase of Eadie’s journey, the novel experience of living life on one’s own terms, resonated strongly with me.

But it was Eadie’s eventual confrontation with real adulthood that struck the loudest chord. That point where, through the prism of maturity, she comes to view herself, her past and the people in it with a new depth of understanding.

And sets about taking care of ‘unfinished business.’

A triumph of a novel and North’s most assured writing to date.

The Unfinished Business If Eadie Browne by Freya North
I give this book 5 stars.

Eadie Browne muddles her way through childhood with her 2 best friends and her strange parents living next door to the cemetery and being bullied at school.
Arriving in Manchester as a student she can be who she wants to be, do as she pleases, and no one back home needs to know. Until, one night, her past comes hurtling at her with ramifications which will continue into her adult life.

If there’s one book you need to read this year it’s this one!
Freya North has captured my heart again with this poignant and compelling novel Told in her beautiful writing style which moves so effortlessly between the decades as the pages come to life, the story unfolds.Be prepared to be swept up in Eadies journey. This is a book I couldn’t put down but equally I didn’t want it to end!
Told in the first person narrative,set in the 70’s,80’s and 90’s, 30 year old Eadie is heading back to her childhood home for a funeral,contemplating her life up to this point. Past and present are linked and nobody is perfect and that’s all I’m going to say as I really can’t do justice to how much I truly loved this story. There was a lot of nostalgia in the book for me and Eadie is a character I won’t forget.
With thanks to Netgalley,Freya North and Welbeck Publishing UK, Mountain Leopard Press for my chance to read and review this book.

A beautifully written family drama that was so compelling, so full of well drawn characters and at times so very sad I couldn't stop the tears from falling , but ultimately so uplifting.
My thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for my copy of The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne and to Freya North for her talent.

Thank you to Net Galley for giving me a preview read of this book.

I've read several of Freya North's books and really enjoyed each one. This was no different.
As someone who was a student in Manchester (in 2010s) and still lives in South Manchester now, I loved learning and living through Eadie's experiences from some years earlier. I felt like I was reliving some of my uni days but in the 1990s, which was unexpected but fun!

I loved the character of Eadie Brown and warmed to her from the beginning. She may have made some questionable choices at times, but that made her feel all the more realistic and human!

Another beautifully written book by Freya North which takes you on a journey of happiness, pain, sadness and coming together was beautiful.

What can I say about 'The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne'? That's Eadie with an 'a' and Browne with an 'e' of course. I fell in love with Eadie the child and my love grew with her as she ventured out into the world outside her strange little house in her strange little garden city. Freya North has written a fabulous story surrounding Eadie , Josh and Celeste. She provides us with the knowledge that the grown up Eadie is on a journey to a funeral and shares Eadie's story as memories during that trip. The cast of characters are well rounded and each deserves their place in Eadie's history. I laughed, I squirmed and I cried happy and sad tears whilst enjoying every bit of this book. This was my first read of 2024... I think the rest will have a lot to live up to! Thank you to the author, NetGalley and publisher for granting me the pleasure of reading this 5* book.
‘What ho, Eadie Browne.’

I have read everything Freya North has ever written and was so excited to be granted access to an ARC of this. Thanks NetGalley.
I fell in love with Eadie very quickly. She’s an unusual child, who lives with her mum and dad, who seem a bit hands-off with their parenting, in a house next to a cemetery. She is friends with the piper and the man who tends the graves. She has 2 friends at school, Josh and Celeste - who are also outsiders, and the three of them form a seemingly unbreakable bond. We follow Eadie as she leaves the comfort and safety of home, first to University, through adulthood, then back home for an unthinkable funeral.
This is a book which brilliantly evokes the confusion and challenge of finding your way in the world, finding and keeping your friends and working out who you really are. Eadie is not always likeable, but she’s very human. She makes mistakes, she is sometimes a bit too quick to speak before she thinks but she’s special, and people love her. I’m about her age, and the university experience Eadie has is very familiar (apart from the whole Manchester scene), and the messages about people not always being who they seem are really lovely. I was really interested to read that the idea arrived in the author’s head when she’d intended to write something else, because Eadie really does seem very real!
I can’t recommend this highly enough.

This book is stunning. A beautifully nostalgic story with plenty I could identify with (& remember first hand!). Written across the 70’s/80’s and a concurrent timeline of 1999 (a time when I was reading Freya North’s wonderful early novels), about friendship in its various forms, success & failure, love and family. The main character and her cast of supporting members were all realistic, and there were many unexpected twists in the story which had me gripped from start to finish.
I am so grateful to have been given an early copy of this to read and urge everyone to make it a must read of 2024.

This is the first book I have read by this author & I really enjoyed it.
Thanks for the opportunity to read & review it.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to read this book, in fact I wasn’t going. Thank goodness I decided to give it a go. This is a beautifully written book that follows the life of Eadie Browne as she tries to figure out who she is. The story is told in the present day with Eadie reliving her memories of growing up during a journey she doesn’t want to make. I will keep my review short as I don’t want to give anything away and also because my words could never do this book justice.

To put it simply I adored this book. I loved Eadie and felt her pain and happiness. I just wanted to give her a big hug and tell her everything would be ok.

This book is so wonderfully written. I cried, happy and sad tears for the last 20% of the book. The book blurb says this is a love letter to youth and I agree wholeheartedly. It is the book I needed to read right now. We think of our youth so lovingly sometimes, but it’s what happening now that is most important.

I haven’t read a book by Freya North in years and having read this I am not too sure why I haven’t, I will certainly be seeking some more out!

Thank you to NetGalley, Welbeck Publishing and the author, Freya North for the chance to read this beautiful novel.

I was excited to read this book as I have loved all of Freya's previous stories.

This felt quite different to previous titles and I did take to Eadie. I particularly enjoyed the friendship with her two besties from primary school and how this lasted into adulthood.

I wasn't too sure about the last part of the book and felt that there was a fairly abrupt ending.

I honestly don’t know where to start with this review. I don’t think I could ever put into words how much I enjoyed reading Eadie’s story. I lived and breathed this book from the first page to the last and was very sad to reach the end. It certainly left me with one hell of a book hangover.

This is Freya North’s 16th novel. I haven’t read any of her other books. Of those who have, reviewers have said how very different this book is to the others. It is beautifully written and I’m guessing, because that’s how it felt, that it has been written very much from the heart. As it says in the book description “a love letter to youth”.

It is almost a time-slip novel in that small parts are set in Eadie’s present, in 1999. A 30 year old woman on a long drive from North to South to attend a funeral with her husband. We don’t know whose funeral but from the snippets of conversation between Eadie and her husband we can gather that perhaps all is not well between the the two.

As they continue on their long journey, the majority of the book is Eadie looking back on her life so far starting with primary school and the school bully. Written in the first person Eadie is as authentic in her narrative as a 7 year old, as she is later on in the book as an 18/19 year old. It is like watching someone grow through childhood, teenage years, young adult to a young woman speeded up in the space of the week it took me to read it.

There are so many wonderful supporting characters. Her friends through school, her parents the ‘centrists’ 😉, the friends she made at Uni all play a huge part in this story. And Manchester itself in the late 80’s. For anyone who was at Manchester University at this time, this book will be such a nostalgic journey with time and place so evocatively brought to life again.

This book is nostalgic, funny, moving, warm hearted and just a beautiful story that had me absolutely captivated.

**To be posted to my blog around publication date**

I absolutely loved this book. It's almost like a collection of unusual ideas - but they all work really well together. The setting of the house by the graveyard and Eadie's relationship with the deceased was brilliant. So believable and the thread is kept throughout of not only where she finds comfort but how it makes her who she is. It's a memoir-style telling of Eadie's story, with characters who move in and out of it and it really keeps the reader engaged. Keeping her parents in the background also worked well. I had a real fondness for some of the characters and they were all wonderfully distinct but I loved that everything wasn't tied up completely neatly. School friends drifted away and came back again. Marriage isn't plain sailing. Dreams aren't always achieved. But ultimately we find our way. I'll be telling everyone I know to read this. And Eadie herself with stay with me for a while.