One Hundred Names by Cecelia Ahern

Val Penny ♦ July 28, 2018 ♦ Leave a comment

The kind of books that Cecelia Aherne writes are much gentler than those I am normally drawn to. However, as my library were giving away books for free, I could not resist picking up One Hundred Names published in 2012. 

One Hundred Names has quite a slow start. We meet the main protagonist, Kitty and learn about the career problems she is having due to a purported scandal that she mistakenly reported. Then we meet her mentor, Constance, who has terminal cancer and then dies.

At this point, I admit, I was tempted to put this novel aside and get back to my usual crime thrillers, but something pulled me to carry on reading. Ahern draws her characters beautifully and the situations she creates for them are credible and interesting.

In One Hundred Names, Kitty is bereft by the death of her friend who has left her a file containing a list of a hundred names. Kitty has nothing else to tell her who these people are, or why they were important to Constance. So, Kitty sets out to track down the people on Constance’s list and why they were included on the list. Although the story Constance planned to write starts out as a mystery. In the process of learning the stories of the people on the list, Kitty starts to understand Constance, and herself, better.

This was not the kind of book that I would normally choose, and that probably goes a long way to explaining the three star score. However, it would make a good book group read and I did enjoy it well enough.

Cecelia Ahern was born and grew up in Dublin, Eire. She is now published in nearly fifty countries, and has sold over twenty-five million copies of her novels worldwide. Two of her books have been adapted as films and she has created several TV series.

Val Penny