Beyond the Moon by Catherine Taylor my Review

Beyond the Moon by Catherine Taylor my Review

My last book of the year and one of the best! This book was an absolute JOY to read. I must confess I enjoyed it so much more than I'd even hoped to.

I was perhaps a little uncertain at first glance, as (apologies to all concerned) the cover reminds me of Mills and Boon books (which I have never liked) but the minute I received my copy, instead of adding it to my tbr pile as is usual, I opened it just to read a few pages to see if it would interest me and hours later I emerged, breathless and spellbound from the pages, wiping a tear from my eye.

This is one superbly written, time-slip romance to rival (eclipse?) Outlander, and for anyone who enjoys a dual time narrative which is vividly descriptive, completely immersive and painstakingly researched this ticks all the boxes.

In the present day we have Louise, grieving deeply for the recent passing of her grandma, with whom she was brought up. All alone in the world, her chosen medical studies on hold, she hits the bottle and in a drunken fog stumbles over a cliff edge and almost comes to grief. Convinced this was a serious suicide attempt and that she is suffering from deep depression and psychosis, she suddenly finds herself bundled off to a truly awful mental hospital from which she cannot escape.

Coldbrook Hall is a hospital located in a former stately home, now run down, badly managed and in disrepair. Despite making a couple of friendships with fellow patients Louisa is desperate to get out of there and managing to slip unnoticed into another part of the building, cordoned off for imminent demolition, she is surprised when she hears a mans voice calling for help....

Meanwhile 100 years in the past, a wounded army Lieutenant, Robert Lovett, lies in his hospital bed, blind and injured, recuperating from terrible war injuries sustained in the first world war. A talented painter he longs only to be able to see again so he can return to the battle front to aid his fellow men and to know that he will be able to paint again.

It is he who is calling for assistance and Louisa who comes to his aid, despite living a century apart, they are drawn together and so begins a seemingly impossible relationship and a deep and abiding love.

The ensuing story takes us back and forth in time, where the experiences on the battlefield are graphic and mind blowingly terrible. I don't think I've ever read such a well depicted tale of war which so clearly made me see the sheer horror of battle and men being forced to fight for their lives in appalling conditions.

The book is also a real testament to a century of medical treatments and advances, although as we see from Louisa's all too credible helplessness, once caught in "the system" modern advances don't necessarily benefit all patients and this book highlights shortcomings in todays privately run mental hospitals.

This is a magical piece of literature and a completely absorbing escape to captivate any discerning romantic reader and one I wholeheartedly recommend. If you've ever enjoyed books by Rachel Hore, Susanna Kearsley or Kate Morton do give this a try and if you're a fan of Diana Gabaldons Outlander series, this will surely enchant you.

The Blurb

Outlander meets Birdsong in this haunting debut timeslip novel, where a strange twist of fate connects a British soldier fighting in the First World War and a young woman living in modern-day England a century later.

In 1916 1st Lieutenant Robert Lovett is a patient at Coldbrook Hall military hospital in Sussex, England. A gifted artist, he’s been wounded fighting in the Great War. Shell shocked and suffering from hysterical blindness he can no longer see his own face, let alone paint, and life seems increasingly hopeless.

A century later in 2017, medical student Louisa Casson has just lost her beloved grandmother – her only family. Heartbroken, she drowns her sorrows in alcohol on the South Downs cliffs – only to fall accidentally part-way down. Doctors fear she may have attempted suicide, and Louisa finds herself involuntarily admitted to Coldbrook Hall – now a psychiatric hospital, an unfriendly and chaotic place.

Then one day, while secretly exploring the old Victorian hospital’s ruined, abandoned wing, Louisa hears a voice calling for help, and stumbles across a dark, old-fashioned hospital room. Inside, lying on the floor, is a mysterious, sightless young man, who tells her he was hurt at the Battle of the Somme, a WW1 battle a century ago. And that his name is Lieutenant Robert Lovett…

Two people, two battles: one against the invading Germans on the battlefields of 1916 France, the other against a substandard, uncaring mental health facility in modern-day England. Two journeys begun a century apart, but somehow destined to coincide - and become one desperate struggle to be together.

Part WW1 historical fiction, part timeslip love story - and at the same time a meditation on the themes of war, mental illness, identity and art - Beyond The Moon sweeps the reader on an unforgettable journey through time. An intelligent read, perfect for book clubs.

Some quotes about the book

*Shortlisted for the Eharmony/Orion Write Your Own Love Story Prize 2018/19

"The characterization is spot-on, as is the historical time-line. Beyond the Moon is not only a page-turner but an intelligent appraisal of medicine, psychology and mental illness over the years. Historical fantasy at its very best." — Historical Novel Society

"A poignant and stirring love story... Taylor’s accomplished, genre-bending book succeeds as a WW1 historical novel and a beguiling, time travel romance... The sharply written narrative deftly moves back and forth between the past and present." — Kirkus Reviews

"A time travel romance, yet so much more than that. It is also an unflinching portrait of the horrors of war, and a look at the torturous extremes a human soul can endure. It is a sonnet to the transformative power of love, even as it is also a criticism of the futility and pointless destructiveness of war." — Shaylin Gandhi, author of By The Light of Embers

Link to the book on Amazon uk

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Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar - atmospheric, historical, wonderful.

My Review

As soon as I saw this book on a friends tbr pile I knew it was exactly my kind of read. Historical literary fiction set in a bleak and harsh alien wilderness with its attendant dangers, brings the opportunity to step back in time and slip into someone else’s shoes and I wasn’t disappointed with the time travel experience this beautifully written, wonderful, haunting novel presented.

Salt Creek begins in England in the 1870s where Hetty is reminiscing about the years she spent living in the Coorong Australia with her parents and siblings. Coorong is the absolute back of beyond and Salt creek is its armpit! A harsh, bleak and very lonely place, yet it haunts her very existence.

Her intractable Papa is a feckless and reckless soul who never quite manages to make a success of any venture he tries yet he is full of big ideas and will never admit defeat. So in 1955 when his life in Adelaide begins to crumble he drags his unwilling family across the plains of Australia to live in a wooden shack he has built with his bare hands, at the edge of a dry country near a coastal inlet where the nearest neighbours are far below the families previous social status, even these Innkeepers, live over 10 miles away running a hotel which caters for the odd passing traveller.

15 year old Hester Finch (Hetty) is appalled when she realises how far they have fallen from the polite society they used to belong to and which now rejects them. A simmering resentment of having to do what her father dictates, together with watching her formerly bright and pretty mother become a nervous drudge, builds and she vows she will never be beholden to a man. She also worries what will become of her younger sister Addy, a sweet, flirty, flighty young miss, prone to tantrums and the apple of her fathers eye.

Life in this totally isolated and relentless spot takes its inevitable toll on the family and all the time Papa’s great ideas falter and fail. The cattle he planned to raise starve in the barren heat, so he exchanges them for sheep, to find they fare no better. He ends up working himself and his sons almost to death with little success and always his misplaced pride stops him asking for help from family and making bad decision after worse – a trait which will have disastrous consequences.

Meanwhile Hetty tries to make the most of their lot. They are a large family and her older and younger brothers plus 2 younger sisters provide companionship and the inevitable sibling rivalries. The odd visitor who occasionally passes their way, some travelling musicians, an artist and his father, provide a little relief from the isolation and an aboriginal boy called Tull whom Papa tries to educate and civilise as part of a pointless anthropological experiment, becomes a pivotal part of the family as his education distances him from his own kin yet his black skin and cultural beliefs prevent him from ever really being part of the Finch family even though he lives as part of the household. His inclusion into the family causes Hetty to wonder just what civilization actually means.

The family have to live beside the natives who have lived off the land around for centuries and who have legends and myths deeply ingrained in the salty sand, but the Finch families intervention changes and damages the land and contaminates the water sucks where the natives get their water from therefore has an adverse effect on the aboriginal folks lives and a resentful truce is difficult to maintain.

I just slid into Hetties skin as though I was born in it, I felt and smelt and lived every second of her difficult life and devoured this deeply affecting and completely wonderful novel, drinking every drop of descriptive storytelling from the bottom of the mug and exhaling a satisfied Aahhh at the end of it.

It is one of those books you wish you’d never come to the end of, yet you can’t wait to get there to discover the outcome. It’s a book to savour, to enjoy and definitely to make you think.

My copy has some reading group notes at the back and I agree this will make a wonderful read for groups of enthusiastic readers who love to discuss and dissimilate every nuance of a story.

The Blurb

Salt Creek, 1855, lies at the far reaches of the remote, beautiful and inhospitable coastal region, the Coorong, in the new province of South Australia. The area, just opened to graziers willing to chance their luck, becomes home to Stanton Finch and his large family, including fifteen-year-old Hester Finch.

Once wealthy political activists, the Finch family has fallen on hard times. Cut adrift from the polite society they were raised to be part of, Hester and her siblings make connections where they can: with the few travellers that pass along the nearby stock route - among them a young artist, Charles - and the Ngarrindjeri people they have dispossessed. Over the years that pass, an Aboriginal boy, Tully, at first a friend, becomes part of the family.

Stanton's attempts to tame the harsh landscape bring ruin to the Ngarrindjeri people's homes and livelihoods, and unleash a chain of events that will tear the family asunder. As Hester witnesses the destruction of the Ngarrindjeri's subtle culture and the ideals that her family once held so close, she begins to wonder what civilization is. Was it for this life and this world that she was educated?

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#TallChimneys by Allie Cresswell #Blogtour extract and #review

Tall Chimneys by Allie Cresswell

Once in a while a book comes along whose description ticks all my boxes and Tall Chimneys is one such novel, so I was delighted to be offered the chance to take part in the blog tour organized by Rachels Random Resources

Read on to read my review and an extract.

Please join me by reading an enticing extract and please visit some of my fellow bloggers on this tour too.

My Review

Tall Chimneys is an engaging literary historical novel set in a rambling tumbledown old country house set in a remote dip in a brooding moorland setting which sets the perfect bucolic scene for this nostalgic tale with a dual time twist.

With plenty of characters to dislike and the antiquity of the location it sets out to draw us into the baleful world of Tall Chimneys, a book about a house and the people who lived there.

Almost as soon as I began reading this book I was reminded of The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. It has the same sombre, brooding, feel of time passing by behind old Oak doors, a subtle air of faded gentility, crumbling grandeur and something just a little askew in what should be an idyllic setting.

From the outset at the beginning of the 20th century we are thrust firmly into the shoes of Evelyn Talbot, spinster sibling whom the family view as a burdensome reliability. From childhood she has felt unwanted and unloved.  As this disagreeable family cast their fates far and wide Evelyn remains at the crumbling and equally burdensome family pile, a rural mansion falling into decay and disrepair.

Unsurprisingly Evelyn and the house have an affinity, nevertheless the one place this young misfit of a woman feels she fits in, becomes a burden to her too. Poor Evelyn all she wants is affection and to fit in, yet every move seems to place her further apart from the society she craves.

Her family and their staff include some thoroughly obnoxious characters, which make the reader root for Evelyn, even if she isn’t always the easiest of women to like, and makes ill advised decisions galore, you will sympathise with her and the way she lives as you grow to know her.

An unexpected encounter brings an unlikely hero into her world which eventually leads to an unexpected, somewhat blighted romance for the lonely and unloved protagonist and as time passes she finds she must choose between her own chance at happiness and the chance to save Tall chimneys.

There is a meandering and sonorous quality in much of the writing which like the house, shrouded in mist and set apart from the world at large, makes you feel weighted by time itself, but the narrative and the story take an unexpected twist or two.

Spread over a century, the authors love and knowledge of history and the very authentic character she has created in Evelyn complement the rather gloomy dust ridden monument which is Tall Chimneys and where I wouldn’t have been surprised to find Miss Havisham lingering.

This is not a ghost story but has a haunting and mesmerising quality which will keep you turning the pages at Tall Chimneys.

The Blurb

Considered a troublesome burden, Evelyn Talbot is banished by her family to their remote country house. Tall Chimneys is hidden in a damp and gloomy hollow. It is outmoded and inconvenient but Evelyn is determined to save it from the fate of so many stately homes at the time - abandonment or demolition.

Occasional echoes of tumult in the wider world reach their sequestered backwater - the strident cries of political extremists, a furore of royal scandal, rumblings of the European war machine. But their isolated spot seems largely untouched. At times life is hard - little more than survival. At times it feels enchanted, almost outside of time itself. The woman and the house shore each other up - until love comes calling, threatening to pull them asunder. 

Her desertion will spell its demise, but saving Tall Chimneys could mean sacrificing her hope for happiness, even sacrificing herself. 

A century later, a distant relative crosses the globe to find the house of his ancestors. What he finds in the strange depression of the moor could change the course of his life forever.

One woman, one house, one hundred years.

An Extract from Tall Chimneys to whet your appetite

The Author - Allie Cresswell

I often think that the experience of being evacuated during WW2 must have been terrifying for the children. Sent off to strangers, arriving in locations so alien to their experiences, little knowing when or if they would return home or see their parents again. And all this in the days before Child Protection - the hosts might have been cruel, mean, violent, even paedophiles. On the other hand, they may have been kind. In this extract, Evelyn collects three girls evacuated from Leeds. 

Evacuees

At Tall Chimneys we had more mouths to feed. Kenneth drove us to the station and we came back with four evacuees from Leeds, where Lancaster bombers and munitions were being churned out by the factories, some of which were owned by Sylvester Ratton. 

Kenneth and Rose wanted a boy because he would have to share a room with Bobby. A school-age boy would be ideal, as Rose was, by then, expecting a baby and didn’t want an extra child who would be under her feet. They picked Malcolm. He was about Bobby’s age but whereas Bobby was chubby and dimpled, Malcolm was thin to the point of being skeletal. He was filthy; ill-turned out in torn trousers and shoes so badly scuffed we could see his toe through the leather. He was snot-nosed and whiney, standing rather apart from the other boys waiting on the platform. Kenneth chose him in preference to the more appealing alternatives because he looked so frightened and Kenneth felt sorry for him. 

I went in search of the girls and spotted one aged about seven in the waiting room. She was holding the hand of a toddler perhaps two and also cradling a baby who was under a year old. They were all dressed in clothes which, though well-mended, were immaculately clean. The hair of the older girls was neatly braided and in ribbons. The baby wore a home-crocheted bonnet. As I approached the little group, the oldest girl shrank away from me and pulled the toddler behind her.

‘We have to stay together, Mam says,’ she announced, defiantly.

The woman who was supervising bustled over with a clip-board. She was hatchet-faced, prim and terrifying, without a shred of maternal instinct or kindness. The girls shrank even further into the grimy corner of the waiting room. ‘Which will you take?’ she asked me. ‘Madam here says they’re to stay together but I’ve told her nobody will have room for three.’

‘I have room for three,’ I said, quickly. ‘I’ll take them all.’ The big girl’s face remained stoical and determined, but a fat tear oozed from her eye and dribbled down her face.

‘Oh!’ The woman took a step backwards and looked me up and down. ‘Mrs…?’

‘Johns, from Tall Chimneys,’ I said, picking up the small leather suitcase which was propped against a nearby chair leg.

The woman sniffed; she knew me, clearly, by repute. ‘Regulations state…’ she began, but I cut her off.

‘This is no time to be hidebound by regulations,’ I declared, stoutly. ‘There’s a war on. We all have to do our bit.’ I reached out my hand to the toddler, who let go of her sister’s and took mine. It was hot and sticky, as Awan’s often was.

‘I’m not sure I can…’ the woman tried another tack.

‘Have a heart,’ I hissed, glancing at her chest as though I doubted she had such a thing - it was as flat as a board - and then at the pathetic sight of the three children. ‘If you doubt me, Mrs Greene can vouch for me.’ Kenneth’s mother was a redoubtable figure in and of herself and a big mover in the WI world. Her name seemed to do the trick.

‘Very well,’ the woman sniffed, leafing through her file of papers. ‘You’ll take Marion, Audrey and Kitty Blakney. Marion is the big one. It says here she wets the bed.’

The seven year old gave a little cry of outrage and shame. Her brave demeanour collapsed and she sank onto the bench behind her in a torrent of tears. The child whose hand I held - Audrey - began to cry also and the baby, naturally, followed suit. The harridan with the clipboard gave a satisfied smile. ‘Good luck,’ she said, nastily, stalking off to exert her authority elsewhere.

If thats made you want to read the book you can order it now from Amazon uk

or Amazon.com

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Mussolini's Island Sarah Day - blog tour and my review

Mussolini's Island - Sarah Day

Blog Tour

My review

A tension filled literary historical novel with depth and a revealing look at fascism.

The compelling and raw subject matter of this new work of historical literary fiction by author Sarah Day is extremely topical as we celebrate 50 years since the end to outlawing of homosexuality.

However this book takes us back to the 1930s and is set in Fascist Sicily where prejudice is still rife and homosexuality enough of a crime to warrant many young gay men being rounded up and imprisoned on a small island San Domino to be kept away from mainstream Italy. 

They are treated more like prisoners of war than actual criminals and have a certain amount of freedom to roam on the tiny island they all end up on, but their freedom is curtailed and resentment and anger simmers amongst these passionate and volatile young men ensuring a tense and exciting setting for this captivating debut novel.

Am I cynical, or is the very last thing you'd imagine doing with a group of young men who’s homosexual tendencies you are trying to stamp out, is send them all to a small island to live in one large room together with nobody else for company? but the tensions arise not just from physical attractions but volatile situations of political unrest.

Apparently this is exactly what happened, as the book is based very much on factual events. It’s a bold subject for a young, debut novelist to tackle and the author does a great job, it’s well written and makes for compelling and convincing reading.

But, Oh boy, did I have to step outside my comfort zone for this when what I imagined was going to be an easy summer read was for me, rather difficult.

Not because of any prejudice, nor because of any graphic sex, as there isn't any (In fact the book is very circumspect given its edgy subject matter and themes of sexuality) but because I have no prior knowledge of Fascism or of Sicily and there were many, many unfamiliar words and terms, names and places I’ve never before come across that I kept having to look up and this interrupted the flow somewhat. In fact the very first sentence threw me, throwing ‘pederasty’ and ‘confino’ into my list of “what I wouldn’t give for a glossary” terms.

There are a lot of characters introduced in the first few chapters, all young men with complicated names, most with nicknames and nom de plumes which they are also referred to as - so I didn’t know who was who or what was what for quite some time but it falls into place and the tension and pace builds as the story unfolds.

The lead characters are Francesco a young man whose past keeps trying to catch up with him and Elena a naïve local island girl, who longs for escape and freedom. She takes a shine to Francesco and is unable to work out why he is not as she would expect a young man to be. She becomes a go between, risking a lot to carry messages, without her brutish father discovering her duality. But her ignorance might become her undoing.

The story builds towards a cruel deception and betrayal and though never an easy read it’s certainly different, informative and sympathetically written and will enthrall readers with a love of Italy or an interest in the rise of fascism.

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