Most Anticipated Reads! The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

Published: 27th May 2021

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

ISBN: 978-1526623119

I fell in love with Natasha Pulley’s imagination as soon as I picked up her first novel The Watchmaker of Filigree Street – anybody who can create a character that’s a clockwork octopus is definitely on my team. So it’s with great anticipation that I await her next novel, The Kingdoms. I have been lucky enough to be granted an ARC copy through NetGalley, but with a lot of reading to get through it might not be read until Christmas. Maybe I should make it my Christmas present to myself.

The book’s main character is Joe Tournier. He’s one of numerous British slaves dotted throughout the French Empire. He has a wife and daughter and has lived his entire life in London. So how come he has memories of a different place to this, a place where English is spoken in England instead of French. He has flashes of a different life to this.

There is a postcard waiting in a sorting office for Joe Tournier. It has been waiting for 91 years and shows a lighthouse named Eilean Mor set on an island in the Hebrides. The postcard was written about a hundred years ago, but Eilean Mor has only been built for six months. It was written by a complete stranger, but a stranger who seems to know Joe very well.

Joe’s quest to find out more about the postcard and it’s writer takes him from French -occupied London to the islands of Scotland. Here Joe will slip through time to fight for his own life, but also for a different future.

Come home again, if you remember.

Meet the Author

Natasha Pulley was born in Cambridge. She read English Literature at Oxford before doing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. In 2013 she went to Japan on a scholarship from the Daiwa Anglo Japanese Foundation. She lived in Tokyo for a year and a half, learning Japanese and researching her first book, ‘The Watchmaker of Filigree Street’. More recently she spent several months in Peru courtesy of a travel grant from the Society of Authors, chasing llamas and researching ‘The Bedlam Stacks’. She lives in Bath