When I Was Invisible

‘‘Do you ever wonder if you’ve lived the life you were meant to?’ I ask her. She sighs, and dips her head. ‘Even if I do, what difference will it make?’

In 1988, two eight-year-old girls with almost identical names and the same love of ballet meet for the first time. They seem destined to be best friends forever and to become professional dancers.

Years later, however, they have both been dealt so many cruel blows that they walk away from each other into very different futures – one enters a convent, the other becomes a minor celebrity. Will these new, ‘invisible’ lives be the ones they were meant to live, or will they only find that kind of salvation when they are reunited twenty years later?

Dorothy Koomson, The knitty-gritty... Dorothy Koomson is the author of twelve novels including That Girl From Nowhere, The Chocolate Run, The Woman He Loved Before, The Ice Cream Girls and My Best Friend's Girl. While writing The Friend she took up, in the name of research, knitting and cocktail mixing - two things that are oddly compatible. Give it a try.