About the book

At the birth of their daughters, best friends Rachel, Mariel and Jenny make a promise: to love and care for each other’s girls exactly as they would their own. Six years later, a tragedy has torn them apart. Within weeks Rachel has packed up and gone. Settling on the beautiful windswept Greek island of Santorini, she knows she has come to the right place, but as she slowly rebuilds her world she can’t forget the pledge she once made to her friends. She hires a private investigator, the enigmatic Johnny Palmer, and arranges for him to send regular updates on the girls she has left behind. Over the years, with Palmer’s help, she is able secretly to soothe their growing pains – as well as those of their parents. But in Rachel’s new island life far from home, who will be there to guide her?

Some starting points for your discussion:

  1. ‘Since I Don’t Have You’ would appear to refer to Rachel’s loss of her daughter Emma, but which other lost loves in the story give the title added resonance?
  2. How do you feel about Rachel’s decision to employ a private investigator? Is she simply passively ‘watching over’ over her friends and their children or are her motives more complicated?
  3. Why has the author chosen to use the first-person narrative?
  4. Rachel’s connection with the island of Santorini is immediate and emotional. What is the role of the setting in the book?
  5. Ingrid says of unconditional love that she has ‘never really known what it meant’. As she makes her own journey during the course of the novel has she achieved a better understanding?
  6. What is it that underpins the friendships between Rachel and Ingrid and Eleni, and are there any parallels with the friendships with Jenny and Mariel that Rachel has left behind?
  7. Mother-daughter bonds are at the heart of the novel; what points is the author trying to make about this most fundamental of life’s relationships?
  8. How does Rachel come to reassess her feelings for her estranged husband Oliver? Do their respective new relationships make for a satisfying outcome?
  9. The author has remarked that the book made her tearful and ‘maybe a bit depressed’ when she was writing it. Did it make you cry? Which are the key emotional scenes or passages?