Laura Barnett is a British writer, journalist and theatre critic.
For her first novel, she has chosen a highly demanding task: exploring the ''what if'' factor in life and mixing and matching three different scenarios, her characters' lives spanning more than five decades.
I loved Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, which covered similar territory, and was curious to see how this attempt would compare with her masterly one.
The Versions of Us is lighter in tone, more strictly structured; confusing, but absorbing and clever, and each character rings true.
The book is neatly divided into three major parts.
Within each part are versions one, two and three of the life and love stories of Eva and Jim, who encounter each other as students at Cambridge.
It's a chance meeting, which happens when Eva's bicycle swerves to avoid a dog, but meets a rusty nail instead.
She also meets Jim, who stops to offer his help at mending her tyre, and their three possible pathways begin.
Versions one, two and three of the remainder of Jim and Eva's lives follow each other in sequential chapters throughout the book, and this is where confusion sets in.
If I stopped reading for any length of time, I found it difficult to remember what had happened previously without flipping back.
I was enjoying the different stories, wanted to see what happened next, and this left me with two choices.
Either I read with no stoppages, or did a considerable amount of flipping pages.
I did both and it says volumes for the quality of her observations and believable characterisations to say that, despite this, I was intrigued and thoroughly entertained by Laura Barnett's brave experiment.
• Patricia Thwaites is a retired Dunedin schoolteacher.
