If you enjoy reading trailing-spouse adventures, and summertime happens to be when you feel a yearning for some new material, we’ve got you covered once again — this time with a trio of stories spanning from the United Kingdom to Malaysia!
Feel free to also reflect on our previous book recommendations (December 2020, June 2021, June 2023) or join my quest to read these books over the next few months:
I’m very excited to tell fellow trailing spouses about my new novel The Light That Bends Round Corners, which tells the story of the interweaving lives of a British expat woman, Laura, and Mariel, her Filipina maid. The book is both a humorous account of expat life — a kind of 21st century version of “The Durrells” (the TV adaptation of Gerald Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy) — while also exploring more serious themes such as abuse, mental health, and migration.
It’s ultimately a story about love, belonging, and discovery.
Florence Reisch is a certified coach and author of “Expat Wife, Happy Life!” This is part one of her story.
I was a young Swiss woman, living a beautiful love story with my boyfriend Alex. One evening, about a year and a half into our relationship, he took me out to dinner and told me he’d been offered a job in West Africa.
Alex came from a family of Austrian diplomats, and had spent several years in Kenya as a child. He had always dreamed of continuing to live an expatriate life as an adult, too, a dream that he had shared with me ever since we had first met in London in January 1996. (I was working as a PR in a communications agency in Geneva at the time, and he was already working in Lausanne for the same large multinational that took us around the world.)
A few months passed between our first meeting and the start of our relationship. We met again the following summer at a lakeside party in Geneva before he left on vacation. Although he had promised to call me when he got back at the end of August, I didn’t hear from him until the end of October, all because of a mix-up with another Florence in his address book! But fate had decided to reunite us no matter what!
When we finally met for dinner, it was love at first sight, and we’ve been sharing our life experiences ever since.