Loved One

A warm, witty, and wise novel about a woman who goes looking for answers after her first love turned best friend dies unexpectedly, and winds up finding herself

When her first love and friend of more than a decade, Gabe, dies suddenly at twenty-nine, thirty-year-old Julia is launched onto an intercontinental quest to recover his lost possessions. Her journey takes her from Los Angeles to London to Barcelona, and into the murky realm of the past, a kaleidoscope that seems to offer more questions than answers about who Gabe really was, and who they were to each other.

It also sets Julia on a collision course with the last woman he loved, an effortlessly beautiful and impossibly cool restaurateur named Elizabeth, who insists on withholding Gabe's beloved guitar--one of the departed indie rock musician's dearest belongings--for reasons Julia can't understand. Both women, it turns out, have something to hide. Are Julia and Elizabeth friends, are they competitors, or are they bound by something deeper than their love of the same man?

An engrossing, transformative journey and a tender coming-of-age story with a complex and powerful love at its heart, Loved One is poised to become an instant classic. Written with crackling wit and deep compassion, it asks profound, resonant questions about life, love, and loss. What happens when we admit that the deepest feelings never die? And just how little do we know about love--if it is, at the end of the day, all we really have? Full of revelations and emotional twists that keep the pages turning, Loved One is an unforgettable novel that introduces Aisha Muharrar as a novelist deeply attuned to the sense of self and of home we find in our closest relationships.