In The Two Lives of Lydia Bird , Lydia is given a second chance at life after losing the love of her life. In this moving work, Josie Silver writes sensitively and powerfully about love, loss, and the journey of grief.
For Lydia Bird and Freddie Hunter, their love for each other was indestructible, and life was smiling down on them. Together for over a decade and months away from taking the big step of marriage, they never expected fate to tear them apart in such a tragic way.
On Lydia's twenty-eighth birthday, Freddie is involved in a fatal car accident, and what was supposed to be a beautiful love story becomes the story of one person: the sad story of Lydia Bird.
Finding herself in a life without Freddie, Lydia plunges headfirst into grief, drowning in melancholy and depression. She's away from work, and her life consists of lying around in her pajamas all day, crying. Furthermore, Lydia doesn't speak to Jonah, her friend and Freddie's best friend, whom she blames for her fiancé's untimely death. The only thing that still seems to keep Lydia in this world is the presence of her mother and sister, Elle.
Everything begins to change when one day, thanks to a pink pill that apparently helps Lydia with insomnia, she goes to a world—the sleeping world. There, Lydia discovers an extraordinary reality: her fiancé is still alive, and she has been given the opportunity to live the future that was stolen from her—a future with Freddie. However, although this sleeping world seems like a bed of roses, Lydia still has her life in the waking world, and she begins to discover that life after grief is perfectly possible, even with the possibility of a new love.
Living two realities—and two personalities—at once, Lydia feels the physical and emotional toll and finds herself inevitably forced to choose between them. While her dormant life offers Lydia the life she's always wanted since her fiancé's death, her waking life now offers her a new reality with her mother, Elle, her coworkers, her cat, Turpin, and, most importantly, a new love who might make her decide to stay permanently.
