Paperback: 291 pages
Genre:Historical Fiction
Publisher: Penguin 2014
Source: Advance Reading Copy
First Sentence: They were a mend-and-make do kind of familyand you had to love them for it.
Review Quote: Hogkinson's second novel is simply but elegantly written, its subtle charms emerging as her gentle, bittersweet story shows history repeating itself over the generations (Sunday Times)
Favourite Quote: "The child was born in the dry, corn-cracked summer when the air was thick with heat. A boy with dark hair and a docile way about him. He barely cried and lay in her arms peacefully, as if he had always been held by her. Birdie was sure the midwife must have known this was not her first child but nothing was said and she was grateful to the woman for her tactful silence."
My Opinion: I throughly enjoyed this novel, the first I have read by this author but hopefully it will not be the last, as I will look out for her debut and any future published works. As the story unfolds the secrets that the sisters share, slowly unravel in a moving tale of a family that faces adversity more than once. Recommended to those that enjoy a family saga.
Précis Courtesy of Goodreads:
The eagerly anticipated new historical novel from the author of 22 Britannia Road: a novel about sisterhood, motherhood, and secrets that cannot be laid to rest.
1913. Unmarried sisters Nellie and Vivian Marsh live an impoverished existence in a tiny cottage on the banks of the Little River in Suffolk. Their life is quiet and predictable, until a sudden flood throws up a strange fish on their doorstep and a travelling man who will change them forever.
1939. Eighteen year old Birdie Farr is working as a barmaid in the family pub in London. When she realises she is pregnant she turns to her mother Nellie, who asks her sister to arrange an adoption for Birdie's newborn daughter. But as the years pass Birdie discovers she cannot escape the Marsh sisters' shadowy past - and her own troubling obsession with finding her lost daughter will have deep consequences for all of them.
Author Profile
Born on October 25th but no record of the year, Amanda Hodgkinson is an award-winning British novelist and journalist who grew up in a small Essex fishing village before moving to Suffolk, and attending the University of East Anglia. Her debut novel 22 Britannia Road was an international bestseller, an Amazon.com book of the year 2011, a Goodreads Choice Award Best Historical Fiction nominee and was published in over sixteen languages. Spilt Milk is her critically acclaimed second novel published in 2014. (Spilt Milk is a refracted version of real life, that impossible mess we inherit and muddle through, yet transmuted here into something shining and meaningful, told in beautiful prose. THE FINANCIAL TIMES.)
Amanda loves to travel, cook, garden and swim (but not all at the same time). She currently lives in SW France in an old stone farmhouse high on a hill, with her husband and two daughters.
Photographs and biographical information courtesy of the following sites.
Goodreads Author Profile Facebook Profile Amanda Hodgkinson on Twitter
Amazon Author Profile Page
I enjoyed all the inter family relations and hearing what did or did not take place in their lives and how it eventually effected them in their futures. It is well worth reading.
ReplyDeleteCath Brookes
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