This is Me by Shari Low Review: Widowhood, Secrets and Second Chances

The premise the publisher sets out is a quietly devastating one. Denise has been married to Ray, her first and only love, and "has never for one moment regretted putting the husband she idolised on a pedestal above everyone and everything else." After forty years of marriage, Ray is gone — and Denise is left to discover that the perfect marriage she built her life around "was fatally flawed." That is the engine of the book: a widow forced to re-read her own history in the light of what she now learns about the man she worshipped. It is the kind of high-concept emotional hook that defines the commercial women's fiction shelf, and the marketing positions it squarely there, billing it as a "gripping and heartwrenching novel perfect for summer reading" and recommending it for fans of Jojo Moyes, Lucy Diamond and Marian Keyes.

Low is a known quantity in this space. Her publisher bio describes her as a No.1 bestselling author of over 20 novels, including One Day in December, A Life Without You, The Story of Our Life and With or Without You; retailer listings credit her with more than 35 books and over five million copies sold across a twenty-five-year career, with bestseller chart appearances in the UK, USA, Canada, Germany and Australia. This is Me was published by Aria in May 2019 and connects to her wider fictional world — the publisher's own promotional material bundles it alongside The Other Wives Club and the Winter Day collection, and readers note with evident pleasure that it features familiar characters from her earlier books. For existing fans, that continuity is a feature: as one Amazon reviewer put it, those returning figures "feel like old friends now."

The strongest testimony comes from the book's reader base, which is both large and enthusiastic. Amazon reviewers repeatedly single out the ending — "Kept guessing the outcome right to the end," wrote one five-star reviewer, while others praise "a tear jerker of an Epilog" and a resolution that lands happily without feeling unearned. The emotional range is another recurring note: one reader described finding "laughter (as there always is in a Shari Low book), suspense, sadness and anger" within a single story, and another credited Low with "the uncanny knack of writing a story that is completely engrossing." The central theme also resonates — one reviewer called it a story "about the consequences of our life decisions, and their impact on those we love," which is precisely the territory the synopsis promises. This is reception drawn from customer reviews rather than broadsheet criticism, and it should be read as such, but the volume and consistency of the enthusiasm is real.

The praise is not unanimous, and the dissent is specific enough to be useful. At least one reader found the book "a bit repetitive" and felt the supporting friendship group was strained — that Low was "trying too hard to make them funny," to the point of annoyance. That critique cuts to a known risk of the genre: the same warmth and banter that make Low's ensemble scenes comforting to fans can read as forced to anyone not already invested. Readers coming to the book cold, without affection for her established characters, may get less from the connective tissue that delights her base. Those looking for the structural tightness or literary ambition of the Moyes comparisons on the cover copy should also calibrate expectations — this is commercial page-turner fiction, pitched for momentum and feeling rather than prose style, and even its admirers describe it in those terms ("easy and entertaining," per one reader).

This is Me is for readers who want an emotionally generous story about grief, self-discovery and second chances, ideally those already fluent in Shari Low's world. The forty-year-marriage premise gives it more weight than pure escapism, and the consistent reader response suggests the payoff — especially the ending and epilogue — delivers. Newcomers to Low may want to start here anyway, since the widow-rebuilds-her-life arc stands on its own, but the fullest experience belongs to those who have read the connected novels. In Kindle form it runs 374 pages, a substantial but undemanding read built for exactly the summer-afternoon consumption its subtitle advertises.