When her first-love-turned-close-friend, Gabe, dies unexpectedly at twenty-nine, thirty-year-old Julia is launched into an intercontinental quest to recover his lost possessions. Her journey takes her from Los Angeles to London and into the murky realm of the past. It also sets Julia on a collision course with the last woman he loved, a guarded, self-possessed florist and restaurateur named Elizabeth, who insists on withholding Gabe's beloved guitar-one of the departed indie rock musician's dearest belongings-for reasons Julia can't understand. Both women, it turns out, have something to hide, and soon and themselves engaged in a complex dance of withholding and revelation.
Muharrar’s work developing her main characters throughout the story allows her to explore deeper themes of grief and loss in the final third of the book without too much sentimentality. Closure may be too much to ask for these grieving women, but it’s enough that they realize they still have lives to live without the object of the book’s title.
Expertly walks the line between humorous and heartbreaking, vividly rendering the complexities of grief as Julia chases Gabe’s possessions around London and Barcelona.
