In Someone Else’s Shoes, Sam’s day takes an unexpected turn after she picks up the wrong bag in the changing room of her local gym. The bag, a genuine Marc Jacobs unlike Sam’s designer knock-off, belongs to Nisha, an American in London and pampered second wife of billionaire businessman Carl. Sam, who works for a printing firm and who is the sole breadwinner in her family, has meetings straight after her gym visit and so has no choice but to wear Nisha’s red crocodile-skin Christian Louboutin heels. The shoes seem to have a hypnotising effect on clients and lead her to land a series of new contracts.
Nisha, meanwhile, declines to wear the tatty flats she finds in Sam’s bag, and leaves the gym in flip-flops and a robe. When she arrives at her hotel for a lunch date with her husband, she finds two men at the door of her room who inform her she is not welcome. Carl, it transpires, has called time on their marriage, cancelled her bank cards and begun a romantic relationship with his assistant.
There’s a Sliding Doors feel to Jojo Moyes’s engrossing, smartly plotted novel about two women from opposite sides of the tracks whose lives become accidentally intertwined. The Star Wars actor Daisy Ridley is the narrator, who skilfully flits between the imperious and increasingly furious Nisha and the quietly downtrodden Sam. Their converging fates underscore both their differences – Sam struggles to make ends meet while Nisha has lived a gilded life – and their similarities as middle-aged women taken for granted by the men in their lives.
• Someone Else’s Shoes is available via Penguin Audio, 12hr 21min
Further listening
Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing
Matthew Perry, Headline, 8hr 49min
The actor best known as Chandler from Friends reads his memoir detailing his difficult childhood, his alcohol and drug addictions and rise to global fame in the world’s most successful sitcom.
Women Talking
Miriam Toews, WF Howes, 5hr 57min
Actor Matthew Edison narrates Toews’s 2018 novel, recently adapted for the screen, set in an isolated religious colony where the female residents make a chilling discovery and must decide what to do next.
