Book Club Meets: Meeting their ex, jealousy, and heartbreak, with Aisha Muharrar
Happy Place
Fearne Cotton
4.6 • 15.2K Ratings
🗓️ 3 October 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Loved Ones – the Happy Place Book Club pick for September – tells the story of Julia, whose first love Gabe dies aged 29, launching her into a world-wide quest to recover the possessions he left with friends and acquaintances across the world. It also brings her into contact with the last woman Gabe loved...
In this chat, Fearne and author Aisha Muharrar wonder what would happen if you met others who had dated the same person as you. Would you get on and have loads in common? Or would there be intense jealousy? They also explore the strange idea that different people know and love very different sides of you.
Aisha was a script writer on TV show Parks and Recreation, and she brings that comedy and levity to the messy topic of grief in Loved Ones. Writing her debut novel was very much a new challenge though – Aisha explains to Fearne why she pretty much had to re-write the whole book!
Enter our competition with Bookshop.org to be in with a chance of winning books for life here: https://woobox.com/9jfwes
Thank you to Fourth Estate for the use of Loved One audiobook, narrated by Emma Ladji.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There was no bride. There was no groom. |
| 0:03.7 | Hey, welcome to the Happy Place Book Club with me, Fern Cotton. |
| 0:07.4 | A blue dot next to Julia indicating a preference for fish. |
| 0:11.3 | Today, loved ones, by Aisha Muhara. |
| 0:14.3 | Aisha Mojara. No maid of honor fiddling with a sheet of white printer paper, |
| 0:20.2 | unfolding it from eighths to |
| 0:21.5 | fourths, then taking a theatrical deep breath before she says, okay, so. Which made sense because |
| 0:30.1 | it was not a wedding. But there were approximately a hundred of us gathered at Berkeley City Club, |
| 0:35.3 | a grand Italian Renaissance revival building often rented |
| 0:38.7 | out for private events, like weddings. And there were two sections of dark wood folding chairs |
| 0:44.0 | separated by a wide stripe of hardwood floor, an aisle, if you will. And more important, |
| 0:50.5 | it just felt like it should have been a wedding. It's what we did that year. |
| 0:55.8 | We went to weddings. |
| 0:57.5 | Not together. |
| 0:58.8 | Though Gabe did ask the year before, when the invitations went out and before he'd started dating Elizabeth, |
| 1:04.7 | if I'd be his plus one to the Tokyo wedding of his percussionist and backup vocalist. |
| 1:09.7 | They'd met on tour with him. |
| 1:11.7 | I would have loved to go to Japan, but I already had another wedding on the same day. |
| 1:17.0 | By September, I'd been to six and RSVPed to three more. |
| 1:21.1 | I was 30. |
| 1:22.6 | Gabe, born the same year but in December, was 29. |
| 1:25.9 | And apparently we'd entered that stage of life where if you |
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