“The Glass Lake” by Maeve Binchy

“The Glass Lake” was the first Maeve Binchy novel I read about ten years ago or maybe even more, and after that, her books have become the ones I turn to when I’m not in the best of moods.

There is so much warmth in her novels that when you read them, it’s like sunbathing under the gentle rays of the sun. They don’t burn you, but they wrap you up in a captivating cocoon. Maeve Binchy’s books return the faith in happy endings to those who have lost it. And at the same time, her stories are not one-dimensional. There are losses and grief in them too.

When I read “The Glass Lake” for the first time, I hadn’t yet been a mother. And the story of a woman who makes a difficult decision that will change not only her life but the lives of her children, affected me from an absolutely different angle than it did when I reread it after I had my son. “The Glass Lake” is a story of choices where no matter which one you make, you’ll choose wrong. It is a story of how love can make a person blind, and what devastating consequences one person’s decisions can bring to a lot of other people.