Zoe, Al, Rachel, Rob, Yas and Indie. Six friends who were inseparable at university, who have all had their secret or not so secret passions for each other, their own hopes and fears.
Over the years, they have gone their separate ways. Rob is a history teacher, with a string of broken relationships behind him. Yas is a surgeon and very much her own woman. Indie is married and a successful coffee entrepreneur. Rachel is a stay at home mum with two children. Al, widowed young, is about to take over his father's funeral business.
When Rob's engagement party throws the gang together once more, some passions are reignited, old connections and resentments resurface. Over the next twelve months, there will, among the friends, be a birth, a marriage, and a death - but whose?
Set over one year and told from multiple perspectives, BIRTHS, DEATHS AND MARRIAGES is an era-spanning, globe-trotting novel about love, friendship, and how to stay at least relatively sane in an ever crazier world. It's about a group of friends growing older, a pair of sometime lovers finding their way back to each other, about kindness and joy. It's about births, deaths, marriages, and everything in between.

Portrait

Laura Barnett is the author of four novels including the number one bestseller, The Versions of Us, Greatest Hits, Gifts and This Beating Heart. As an arts journalist and theatre critic, she has written regularly for the Guardian, Observer, the Daily Telegraph and Time Out London. Laura lives with her husband Andy, son Caleb and cat Eno in rural Kent.