The Verdict
If you came from the Apple TV series, or you spotted this novel on a shelf, today’s question is simple: is Imperfect Women worth reading?
My verdict is yes, with a caveat about pace. It is a slow, thoughtful novel about friendship, guilt and marriage that happens to contain a murder, and I give it four out of five. This review is spoiler free, so there is no killer, no late reveal and nothing past the first death.
What Imperfect Women Is About
Imperfect Women is a novel by Araminta Hall, published in twenty twenty. The ebook I read credits her with an earlier book, Our Kind of Cruelty, and says she teaches creative writing and lives in Brighton.
The story starts in the middle of the night. Eleanor gets a phone call from Robert, who says that his wife, Nancy, has not come home. Within hours, two policemen are at the door. Nancy, one of Eleanor’s two oldest friends, has been found dead by the river.
From there, the book asks what happened to her, and what each of the women who loved her did, or did not do, in the weeks before.
The Three Women
The heart of the novel is a friendship that began when Eleanor, Nancy and Mary met in their first week at Oxford, more than twenty five years earlier.
Eleanor runs a small aid charity and lives alone. Nancy is a beautiful translator, married to a human rights lawyer, with a daughter at university. Mary has three children, a house that is falling apart and a marriage that her friends can see is wearing her down.
They love each other, and they are also quietly competitive, quick to judge, and wary of being left out. What I liked most is that none of them is a saint. They are petty and unfair in ways that felt true to me.
How It Is Built
The novel is told in three parts, one in each woman’s voice, in the order Eleanor, Nancy, then Mary. I think this is its smartest move. Each part gives you a different angle on the same events, and each one changes how you see the other two.
That means the mystery is not driven by a detective. The police are around, but this is not a procedural. The answers come from inside the friendship, and you only get them when you reach the right person’s chapter.
Is It A Mystery
It depends what you want from the word. There is a crime, a set of suspects, a missing phone and a letter that someone should not have kept. But the book is more interested in the ripple effects than in clues. It is closer to a family drama than to a whodunnit.
I would call it a mystery in the old sense: something is hidden, and the pleasure is in how it is uncovered. The writing is careful about when to withhold information, and I found myself reading faster in the last third.
The Writing
Hall writes in close third person, and the sentences are full of metaphor. Mary imagines her life from above like a child’s building set, and a feeling of freedom described as a balloon filling with air. Eleanor sees herself as a fraud in her friends’ perfect house.
That style gives the book a literary feel, and some of the images are lovely. It also means the plot moves slowly while the characters think. If you enjoy a book that stops to look at a feeling, you will be well served here. If you prefer clean, quick prose, you may find it a bit much.
The Setting
The novel is set in contemporary England. There is a smart London house with a basement kitchen, a country place in Sussex, a cramped family home with a gate that has been hanging off its hinges for years, and a remote cottage on the Yorkshire moors.
The settings do real work. You can see the gap between Nancy’s polished life and Mary’s chaotic one in a few details, and the book never needs to say it out loud.
Reading Experience
A practical note. The book’s three parts feel like three different novels. The first is grief and suspicion. The second is a tense, claustrophobic portrait of one woman under pressure. The third is the most plot driven, and the one where the book earns its title.
If you find part one slow, push through. Part two shortens the distance between you and Nancy, and part three makes the whole thing click. I would not read the last part first, because each section leans on the one before.
What Works
First, the characters. Eleanor’s guilt, her wish to be needed and her bitterness feel earned. Nancy is written with real sympathy, and her section is the emotional core. Mary’s part is the most dramatic, and it is where the book pays off.
Second, the themes. The novel keeps asking what women owe each other, how much guilt is useful, and what it costs to be the person who holds everything together. These ideas are woven into scenes instead of lectures.
Third, the minor people. Irena, Eleanor’s elderly neighbour from Poland, is a small character with a large effect on the book. Her warmth gives the story somewhere to breathe.
What Doesn’t
The pace is the main issue. Hall spends a lot of time inside her characters’ heads, and the sentences can run long. If you want a twist every ten pages, you may get restless in the first part.
Some readers will also find the women hard to like at times. They make decisions that I found frustrating, and a few early chapters circle the same worries more than once.
And the plot leans on one big idea at the end. I will not say what it is. It works for me emotionally, but you may feel it asks you to accept a lot.
How Long Is It
My copy comes to roughly one hundred thousand words. For an average reader, that is something like seven hours, and you can read it in a long weekend. The three parts are different lengths, with the first being the longest.
What I Would Change
If I could change one thing, I would trim the middle of part one, where Eleanor’s thoughts about guilt circle back on themselves. I would also give the police more to do. They fade from the story quickly, and the case itself feels a bit under explored.
Those are small complaints. The book knows what it wants to be, and it mostly gets there.
Content Warnings
The book has explicit sex scenes, emotional cruelty in a marriage, coercion in a relationship, the death of an older character, grief, and a reference to suicide. There is also a scene of sexual menace in one character’s past.
If those are hard lines for you, read with care. The tone is serious throughout, though it is not gratuitous.
What Makes It Different
Many novels about a murdered woman treat the victim as a prop. This one does the opposite. The book gives Nancy her own part, her own fears and her own voice, and it refuses to reduce her to the headline that calls her death a crime of passion.
It also notices how the media and the people around a victim talk about her. Eleanor is furious at how television discussions turn Nancy into a lesson about affairs. That small detail tells you where the novel stands.
I appreciated that. It makes the book feel like a conversation about women’s lives, not just a puzzle, and it gives you something to think about after the last page.
Imperfect Women Vs The Series
Apple TV released a series based on the book, reported as eight episodes, starting March eighteenth, twenty twenty six. The cast is reported as Kerry Washington, Elisabeth Moss and Kate Mara as the three friends.
I have only read the novel, so I cannot review the series. Reports say it moves the setting to California and changes how Nancy’s death is explained. I cover the verified differences in my book versus series video, with spoilers.
The Scores
Here is how I score it. The hook gets four out of five, because that first phone call is gripping. Tension gets three and a half, since the slow pace holds it back. Characters get four and a half, because the three women feel real. Pacing gets three, and impact gets four and a half, because the ending stayed with me. That gives an average of just under four.
Who Should Read It
Read Imperfect Women if you like character driven stories about women’s friendships, if you enjoyed books in the same neighbourhood as Big Little Lies, or if you want a mystery that cares more about why than who.
Skip it if you need a fast thriller, if long inner monologues bore you, or if marriages that fall apart are a hard subject.
Final Thoughts
It is not perfect, and I think that is the point of the title. It is a smart, humane book about the people we are loyal to, and the ways we fail them. If you have read it, tell me in the comments what you thought, and if you are ready for the answer, my ending explained is next.
