1939 – Grace Grey lives in Grosvenor Place in London, with her mother Edeline who is a friend of the notorious Mosleys and wears the uniform of the Blackshirts. As war comes ever closer, Edeline makes the decision to send Grace and the housekeeper’s daughter Rose Munro to stay with her brother Marcus and his wife Olive in the north west coast of Tasmania. After an eight week voyage the girls are welcomed to Towerhurst, an unusual house with a whole tower where Uncle Marcus writes his poetry. Olive immediately takes to the beautiful Rose, but Marcus forms a bond with Grace over the poems of Banjo Patterson, an Australian ballad poet. Grace is reserved and shy, but is slowly coaxed out of her shell by Daniel McGillycuddy an Irish lad working at his aunt and uncle’s sawmill for Huron Pine. As war creeps ever nearer to their part of the Pacific there are dangerous emotional games at play between these young people with fall out that will extend over the rest of the century.
1975 – out of the blue Willow and Ben have been summoned to the north west of Tasmania because of a mysterious legacy. Willow has been left a house called Towerhurst, by an anonymous benefactor who placed it in trust. They decide it’s a great place for Ben to write and Willow to paint, but on their first visit Ben goes missing in the rainforest having fallen down an old mine shaft. What he finds there sends him on a quest that ends in London chasing a story about two young girls who lived at Towerhurst during WW2.
2004 – Libby has flown from Tasmania to London, wanting to claim the belongings of her father who died in the Moorgate Tube Station accident before she was born. Staying with her eccentric aunts in Grosvenor Square, she starts to follow the clues she finds in her father’s satchel: a publisher’s address, a book of ballads by poet D. McGillycuddy and the name Molly Munroe. Her quest will take her to a gentleman’s club, a narrow boat and eventually out to Ireland to solve a mystery that’s been laid buried for half a century.
I enjoyed Amanda Gerard’s first novel last year, so looked forward to reading her new one for a while. I was interested to see how her writing had developed over the last couple of years. To undertake a novel that takes in most of the 20th Century, three timelines and three different settings takes enormous confidence and she has definitely grown in confidence. This is a more complex novel, combining historical fiction with mystery and some romance too, but she pulls it off beautifully and I’ve absolutely loved it. From the historical perspective I learned a lot about living through WW2 in the Pacific Ocean, a completely different experience compared to Europe and the U.K. particularly. I thought Amanda beautifully captured how transient lives were at that time. This wasn’t just about the two English girls, Grace and Rose, uprooted from everything they knew and sent to the other side of the world. It was about the chaos of war, never knowing where your loved ones were, particularly if they were away fighting and whether they would ever come home again. For women that was especially difficult, left at home to wait but also left outside the experiences their men were having. Many women did their own war work, both to do their bit but also to feel a little closer to their men and as if they’re helping them to fight. War displaces people and there were huge shifts across the years of WW2 and afterwards as prisoners of war were slowly released and women who’d married a G.I. or perhaps a Polish airman travelled back to their native countries to start a new married life. It was a good time for people to disappear or slip away under the radar. I already knew a lot about the Blackshirts and their admiration of Hitler’s Nazi Party, but here I learned more about the women recruits and their activities. There was a breadth of research here, underpinning and enhancing the story across three different generations.
The main love story is so touching as the slightly awkward Grace is lured down to the beach by neighbour Daniel where he tries to kiss her. Sadly though it’s for a five shilling bet and as his mates turn up in a boat to witness her humiliation she runs away into the sea. It’s his friend Puds who has to rescue her, as she can’t swim and finds herself caught in an undertow. Daniel regrets his actions deeply, apologising the very next day and asking if Grace would perhaps share the book of ballads she’d been telling him about. They pass through the Moon Gate, a perfectly round doorway made of Atlantisite that leads to the waterfall and a small freshwater pool. Uncle Marcus claims that to pass through the gate is to become a new person and that certainly seems the case with Grace who not only forgives Daniel, but shares the ballad poems and agrees that he can teach her to swim. It’s so beautiful to watch them become close friends, but Grace knows that it’s Rose that Daniel finds attractive as everyone does at first. I felt for Grace deeply and I think a lot of other bookworms will too because she’s so uncomfortable in company, prefers solitude and loves words so much. My therapist side wanted to help her, because how does she learn to be herself and be confident in that, when even her own mother preferred Rose? When we’re not shown love from our parents, a child can’t understand that it’s a fault of the parent, so they learn there is something wrong with themselves. Grace is shocked by the help and affection she gets from Uncle Marcus, because her own mother is so austere and critical.
It was Rose who spent time with Edeline and became a member of the Blackshirts alongside her. Whereas Rose’s mother, the housekeeper Molly, can see something wonderful in Grace and so can her Uncle Marcus, it just needed to be coaxed out and nurtured. I was so invested in her feelings for Daniel and desperate for him to be clear about whether he had feelings for her. Rose is doing her bit in undermining and leading Grace to believe that Daniel only has eyes for her. She makes sure Grace knows when he writes from wherever he is in the world and if Grace shares news of her friend, Rose makes it clear she knew first. I’ve never wanted to slap a book character more! I wasn’t even sure that she genuinely loved Daniel, she’s just so used to getting one over on Grace that she hasn’t stopped to think it through. There are rumours in town about Rose and Uncle Marcus, she even winds Puds round her little finger but I wasn’t sure to what end? She certainly keeps her cards close to her chest, but when Rose takes up war work and isn’t around as much Grace can actually breathe. As I read I wasn’t sure what Rose was up to but I was certain there was something behind her manipulations and out of character support for the war effort. It’s a shock when her name comes up again in Libby’s investigations, was her father Ben simply interested in her fascist connections or is it something more personal?
There are definite echoes through the different time periods and motherhood is one of those themes that recurs. It’s an inter-generational trauma that starts with Edeline’s treatment of her daughter. Grace knows she isn’t her mother’s favourite, but is confused when this animosity seems to recur with her Aunt Olive. She asks a devastating question of her Uncle Marcus – ‘am I unloveable?’ because if her own mother can’t love her, why would anyone else? Willow has never known her birth parents, instead brought up with her two sisters who are twins. She never asked the question, even though she can see how different she is physically from her sisters. So when Towerhurst comes along, she starts to be intrigued by who created the trust and whether it could be one of her real parents. She finds out she’s pregnant alone, while Ben is over in London, but manages to tell him on the phone just before he is killed and they are both so happy in that moment. To then become a single parent, in such tragic circumstances must have been so difficult to come to terms with. Willow has never tried to collect Ben’s belongings despite knowing they were found and Libby clearly thinks her mother will disapprove of her choice to follow in his footsteps. Willow hasn’t been a terrible mother, just rather aloof and deeply engrossed in her work as a painter, where she demonstrates her terrible grief by only painting in black and white. She hasn’t grieved fully and I could see that Libby’s findings might bring those feelings to the surface. Luckily, Libby has had her eccentric aunts for support and it’s clear they adore her, but I hoped that Libby and Willow would have chance to talk and heal together.
As the mystery begins to unravel, there are revelations about these three generations that keep coming and a twist I truly didn’t expect. There are small disclosures, like the local police sergeant who helps the search for Ben is actually Puds, Daniel’s best friend who suffered a serious injury in the war and had to return home. How will he go about investigating what Ben finds in the mine shaft, when it might be better if they’d stayed buried? I was desperate to find the whereabouts of Rose, because all the hints are pointing to an answer I simply couldn’t bear! It seems possible that Grace never returned to England, but when Rose’s mother tells Ben she definitely saw Grace after the war he starts his search afresh. Could she have disappeared on this side of the world? I was constantly holding out a little bit of hope for the ending I wanted, so I had to keep reading – up till 2am again! There are so many layers to this story and often with dual timelines there’s a weaker section, but every timeline is intriguing, evocative and emotional. Tasmania sounds wild, dangerous, magical and atmospheric all at once. I loved the reference to the creature that lurks around the pool beyond the moon gate, could it be a shy Tasmanian devil? There’s such a massive difference between Tasmania and London, which feels more domestic than wild with very curated spaces like the old fashioned gentleman’s club and the minimalist narrow boat where Libby meets Sam. Then there’s Ireland, waiting like a promised land with all the answers and the beauty that Daniel shares with Grace right back at the beginning. We are left with an incredible tapestry of places and people full of colour, emotion and a yearning for home whether home is a place or a person.
Meet the Author
I have always loved dual-timeline novels, where stories from the past weave with those of the present day. I want to write books that transport you to another time and place, where secrets lie just beneath the surface if only the characters know where to look.
My new novel, The Moon Gate, is set across three locations I ADORE: Tasmania (my home state), London (where I rented a houseboat for many years) and County Kerry, Ireland (where I now live with my family). Each of these places is special to me and I hope you’ll feel you’re entering the temperate rainforest with Grace, opening the door to Towerhurst with Willow, walking through London’s layered history with Libby and stepping out to the heather-clad hills of County Kerry with … well, with several characters, the names of who I won’t reveal here!
The inspiration for my first novel, The Midnight House, appeared in the rafters of our Irish home, a two-hundred-year-old stone building perched on the edge of the Atlantic. Hidden there was a message, scratched into wood: ‘When this comes down, pray for me. Tim O’Shea 1911’. As I held that piece of timber in my hands, dust clinging to my paint-stained clothes, I was humbled that a person’s fingerprint could, in a thousand ways, transcend time, and I wanted nothing more than to capture that feeling of discovery on the page.
I’m also a geologist who loves to explore the world’s remote places. Luckily for me, writing novels provides a similar sense of wonder and discovery; but the warm office, fresh food and a shower in the evening make the conditions rather more comfortable! It’s also the perfect excuse to regularly curl up by a fire with a great book (often by the wonderful authors who write in my genre). I treasure my reading time, and I know you do too, so thank you for taking a chance on my books.
Come over to Instagram and Twitter (@amandageard) where I share plenty of photos of the wild settings in The Midnight House. You can also find me on Facebook (@amandageardauthor).
I love hearing from readers, so please get in touch!
From Amanda’s Amazon author page.
The Lotus Readers 