Category: Netgalley

Published: 4th March 2021 Pan Macmillan (Picador)

I loved this book so much that I went to bed early two nights running so I could finish it uninterrupted. I was so drawn in by the isolation of this lighthouse, that it was just standing directly in the sea and no one could come on or off until the relief boat came. Inspired by true events, the story is set in two time frames. In one we learn that a writer is researching a book on a famous disappearance of three lighthouse keepers. In 1972, miles off the coast of Cornwall a relief boat arrives at the Maiden, to find the door locked from the inside, the clocks stopped and no sign of the Principle Keeper or his two assistants. He contacts the women left behind by these men: Helen, wife of the Principle Keeper, Arthur; Jenny, wife of Bill his deputy; Michelle, girlfriend of the new recruit Vince. They have all received money from Trident, the company who employ the keepers, but with that came a directive, not to talk about the events surrounding the mystery. At the time, Vince came under the most suspicion. New to the area and with a criminal past, he seems the likely candidate to have harmed the others. Yet, why would Arthur write of a huge storm in the log, when seas had been calm all week? What became of the small boat rumoured to have sailed near the Maiden? There were also whispers about a mechanic sent to carry out repairs at the Principle Keeper’s request. It’s hard, years later, to distinguish between rumour and truth. Will any of the women speak to the writer and will they finally solve the mystery of what happened to the men?

This felt like an intriguing mix of mystery and love story, with a hint of the supernatural. There was a real difference between the sections on land and those at sea. As we meet the women, there is a grounded reality about their stories and their lives. Whereas the sections out in the sea are surprising, although there’s routine in the keeping of a lighthouse, it still feels like an escape, cut off from the real world. As they look out surrounded by waves they could be in any time and the struggles of the world can’t reach them. The sea narrative has a disjointed feel at times, they shift and turn, we’re sometimes unsure what is reality and what is fantasy. The women’s recollections feel more based in fact, they’re relating their own history whereas the keepers seem firmly in their present- only reacting and dealing with what is in front of them. This shows the huge disparity in how these couples were living their lives back in 1972. I could really imagine that jolt of having the person you spend your life with leave for several weeks, then just as you’re used to their absence they return again. It made me think of military marriages that often flounder because of this. Just as the home has a routine, it’s disrupted by someone returning again, changing the dynamic and wanted to do things differently. I felt particularly for Jenny, who has children to cope with in this remote area with little support and I could see how resentment might build.

These have not been easy relationships and living with the uncertainty of what happened to their men has affected them differently. Helen has experienced so much loss, losing Arthur after losing her only child who drowned when he was a toddler. The sea has claimed everything she loved and while she is matter of fact in stating the men must be dead, her certainty is brittle and she hasn’t fully let go of the events at Maiden. Helen feels that even when Arthur was home, he wasn’t fully present. Something of him always stays out on the sea – in fact perhaps, it’s the only place he truly makes sense. The Maiden is always there, towering between them like a mistress. Arthur does love to be out there, but for reasons Helen hasn’t realised. There is a sense that this couple have stopped talking and just below the surface there are secrets, some that perhaps explain Jenny’s animosity toward her. Jenny can’t seem to accept that her husband Bill has gone and welcomes someone trying to find out the truth. There is a hatred of Helen that runs deep, but it takes some time to find out whether she has reason to resent her so much. Michelle has moved on and is now married with children. She is very pragmatic about her life choices, she knows she doesn’t love her husband as she loved Vince but it can work and they have a family. Although there were so many rumours, Michelle is adamant in her defence of her first love. Yes, he had committed a crime and had often mixed with the wrong people. She could believe the rumour of the mechanic, despite Trident claiming they didn’t send anyone. Perhaps this was Vince’s past catching up with him, dressed in a mechanic’s overalls?

I loved the descriptions of the sea, and how it was a character in its own right. Sometimes calm, deceptively so, until a sudden swell could catch you by surprise. There are storms where waves batter the tower almost all the way up to the light itself. The sea is capricious, relentless and must be respected. The little touches of the supernatural add to the puzzle and intrigue the reader. Arthur’s sighting of something glinting silver in the sea or the little sail boat that passes by. Bill’s strange story of seeing the same man twice as he’s driving along and has to stop for him to cross – somehow he knows this isn’t a lookalike, it is exactly the same man. Is there a link between this strange story and the mechanic who turns up and seems to know all about them? This is where I started to wonder what was real? I wasn’t sure whether one of the keepers was having a mental health crisis and we were privy to his inner thoughts and delusions. Bill also has a strange attachment to Helen and I wasn’t sure whether his affections were returned or whether he was obsessed. Just enough little creaks, bangs and noises about the place are also making Vince jumpy. Could the isolation have proved too much for him?

The author weaves an unsettling tale and I wasn’t sure we would ever know what really happened. I was surprised, but incredibly satisfied by the ending. I thought the depiction of complicated grief in all the women felt real and honest. The glimmer of hope for their future was very welcome. I was left though, with an eerie feeling and a sense that the lighthouse might still be holding some secrets. That perhaps if you sailed nearby on a clear day you might see a father and his small boy looking out to sea, together forever in this one place outside of time.

Meet The Author

Emma Stonex is a novelist who has written several books under a pseudonym. THE LAMPLIGHTERS is her debut under her own name and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Before becoming a writer, she worked as an editor at a major publishing house. She lives in the Southwest with her family.

This is a great Christmas read and a few friends will be getting this as part of their Christmas parcel this year! I’m a little glad that illness has set me back a few months and I ended up reading this just before Christmas. It’s made me feel fuzzy and full of warmth. This is a sort of Christmas Carol meets One Day type premise. We follow Ben and Daphne who meet at university in an amateur dramatics production and are now married after fifteen years together. From love at first sight this couple’s relationship is fading fast. Ben feels he is at a crossroads and we see their life from his point of view. He feels unsuccessful after several fruitless attempts at a novel, whereas Daphne goes from strength to strength as a literary agent. We start in Christmas 2020 as Daphne goes to her work ‘do’ alone, while Ben is set to put up the Christmas decorations at home. Instead, Ben is at the pub lamenting his lot over a few pints and musing on his marriage, They seem to argue all the time and Ben can’t see a way forward. However, he does find a way back.

In the pub he meets a watch seller, an elderly man who reminds Ben of his Grandad. Although he tries not to engage, he somehow ends up with a wristwatch, that seems stuck a few minutes to midnight. This is the device the author uses to send Ben through time to strategic points that will hopefully be revelatory, in time to realise the right path. For some reason I hadn’t expected this magical element and that really elevated it above the ordinary for me. It made me think of the film About Time where life lessons are learned through the ability to time travel (and I always dissolve into a sobbing heap while watching). Ben’s been feeling dissatisfied for a while. He hasn’t fulfilled his potential as a writer, made worse by the fact that his absent father is so successful. He still isn’t over his mother’s death a few years before. He’s been with his wife, Daphne, since university and he really isn’t sure if they should still be together. They’ve struggled over the last couple of years, and he feels Daphne has changed from the girl he married into a bitter and angry woman, always snapping at him. When he thinks back to the pivotal moment they met, at a university play, he wonders whether he made the right choice that night. He and his friend Alice had spent so much time together that term, there’d been mild flirting as this performance drew near and he felt there was an unspoken agreement that the party after this performance might be the time for things to go further. Then Daphne had come through the door and the attraction was instant. Lately though, he’s been in touch with Alice again and they are making plans to meet. He’s now wondering if he chose the wrong girl all those years, that Daphne was merely a distraction, and he’d be happier with Alice. At this pivotal moment he’s offered the watch, that seems to be stuck at five minutes to midnight. Ben thinks it’s worthless, but this watch will propel him through Christmases past and future to answer the questions he’s asking himself.

There’s a reason people reuse Dickens’s Christmas Carol as a narrative structure, and that’s because it works. It shows us how our hero has become the man we meet at the beginning. It shows him how he got here, but gives him perspective and balance by showing the other person’s viewpoint. Finally, the watch takes him forward into the future he was wishing for himself, so he can see if it’s really better than the one he already has. There are many revelations along the way for us and for Ben. In one section we see how Daphne wins an award at work, but blows off the ceremony in order to commiserate with Ben who is feeling down about his work being rejected. Ben had never known about the award and it triggers him thinking about all the little things she’s done that he hadn’t noticed. A meet up with his Dad at his mum’s funeral opens his eyes to his dad’s failures in other areas of his life compared to his career. Ben had envied his Dad’s success as a writer, but does he have success as a father and as a husband? Ben goes into these encounters with all the knowledge he has in the here and now, so he knows how he responded in the past. He wonders whether changing those responses will impact the future? He’s still unsure about his marriage, but the more he sees of Daphne in the past the more he starts to really appreciate his wife. She’s thoughtful, she listens to him, she’s kind to others and has great friendships. She had a great relationship with his Mum and he realises he never once asked how she felt when his mother died. He sat in his grief alone instead of sharing their loss and missing her together.

I love the psychoanalytical aspect to these travels – he’s faced with the truth of himself and past events: is the image he has of his absent father a true one, what upsets him so much about the discussion he had before his mother died, and why does he now believe that it was his friend Alice, not Daphne, who he should have fallen in love with that night long ago? Is he thinking about Alice because he truly feels she’s the one or is it simply that he has idealised her when compared to the complexity and hard work of living with someone long term? If he only thinks about his father as a great playwright could he be excusing his absence as a Dad, as well as imagining he has passed on an inheritance of genius writing talent – as yet unseen in himself. These questions are answered in a series of self-revelations, as each trip back is like a self-contained therapy session. He realises that he’s been looking back on events as if he’s had no control over them, but some events that ‘just happened’ were choices. Daphne didn’t just happen to him that night at the play, like a quirk of fate, he chose to kiss her. Similarly, the events on a break in Paris, were active choices he made. He has to accept there’s a lot of self-pity in his outlook on life and he can’t abdicate his responsibilities for bad choices. I had to keep reading because I was waiting for him to realise that the angry, bitter woman he describes at the beginning of the book is partly his creation. The culmination of all this comes as he sees Christmas future, the changes he thinks he wants in the present come to pass, and he lives a totally different Christmas Day. This is the catalyst for his decision on what future he really does want, but he isn’t sure whether the watch will ever bring him back to the present. Then, if he does reach the present, can he move forward never talking about the revelations he’s had or admitting the things he’s done wrong? Will he have to risk everything he has, to win it back again?

This is a beautifully written book, with a clever premise and a really interesting character at the centre. As with all versions of this Christmas story, the magic happens to someone whose lost all their hope and optimism in life – partly because of events that have shaped them, but largely due to their own character flaws and outlook. Once they are shown other people’s point of view, a different perspective and where their self-destructive path is leading them, it can hopefully bring about change. I did hope all the way through that Ben would find his way back to Daphne, despite some of the things he’s done. I also wanted him to have consequences, to work a little for the love and support she has shown him over the years that has gone largely unacknowledged. With one magic watch, the old man from the pub manages what I try to achieve with clients in therapy. Self-awareness, clarity about their part in their life choices, responsibility for their actions, then a way of reconciling with all of they have learned and planning a pathway forward. It’s just that Ben does it all in one night! Each time hop has helped him come a little closer to the truths of his life. I didn’t always like him, but then I’m not sure we’re meant to. He needs to be a little flawed, in order for the revelations that come his way to have an effect. It’s a simple lesson – that none of us are perfect, that all relationships involve an element of taking the other person for granted even without meaning to, and that we have to accept our own flaws and mistakes as well as the flaws of our loved ones. Love, acceptance, time travel and Christmas – it’s a magical combination.

Meet The Author

Tom is an author and journalist from London, England. He is the co-writer of three critically acclaimed Young Adult novels: LOBSTERS (which was shortlisted for The Bookseller’s inaugural YA Book Prize), NEVER EVERS and FRESHERS. His solo adult debut novel is the romantic comedy ALL ABOUT US (HQ/HarperCollins, published October 2020). His books have been widely translated and are published in 20 countries. He is a regular contributor to Viz magazine, and has also written for Cosmopolitan, Empire, Evening Standard Magazine, The Daily Mash, Glamour, NME, ESPN, ShortList, Time Out London, Vice, Stylist and many more.

Published: Thomas Mercer. 1st December 2020

ISBN: 978-1542020015

This is a deeply unsettling novel, set in a near future dystopia which reminded me somewhat of Westworld. It’s an opportunity that seven strangers can’t pass up when Timeo Technologies invites them to test out the very latest in leisure experiences. Our group of characters are promised a luxury getaway of their dreams, an adventure they’ll never forget. The last part is definitely true.

Amelia wonders why she’s been invited, especially when she meets the other guests who have more obvious benefits to Timeo – a social media influencer, a photographer, a games developer and a financier. They have nothing in common with Amelie who works for an NGO and prioritises helping others. Where do her skills fit in? However, as the trip develops it becomes clear that this seven have something else in common – each has a huge secret they wouldn’t want the world to know about. Every guest is fitted with a tracker that is symbiotic; it fastens into the skin behind the ear to tap into the body’s nervous system. Once activated it’s impossible to remove without causing damage, a sensation that made me feel really uneasy – I would be worried that it would give them control over me. Of course there is a downside. Instead of enhancing their island experience, or simply tracking where they are, this technology appears to harvest memories and then manifest the worst of them like a flickering projector film. Each person must relive a time when they behaved at their worst, knowing that every other guest can see it too. One character relives a time she attacked a girl with a glass in a nightclub. The guilt and shame is terrible and each person responds differently. As injuries and paranoia start to set in, Amelia begins to think that the only way to leave the game is to be the one left standing when the countdown ends. As each person makes their way to the big house, where a party is promised, true characters emerge and the group are split. Who will get there first and what will they have to do in order to get there?

I really enjoyed the opening chapters of the novel where we get to know the seven characters and they get to know each other. This was fascinating to read for a therapist like me, because we are only being introduced to everyone’s surface characteristics. The rest will slowly emerge. The author cleverly sets the scene with a sense of foreboding and although I wasn’t really invested in any particular character, I did start to worry about what was to come. I enjoyed the set-up of the technology, it felt believable within the context of real innovations mentioned in the narrative. This felt like the future, but not too distant. I did think the entire island was virtual for most of the narrative, because the setting felt strange. The island itself felt warmer and more tropical than an island off the south coast of the U.K. A couple of participants seem to have memories of the island and there were also moments that felt artificial, such as where Amelie noticed pixelation at the house. I wondered how far the device they were wearing created the environment and whether Amelie noticed differences because she was on an alternative type of tracker. It was more like a ‘Fitbit’ than the headset worn by the others and wasn’t quite as advanced.

To get the best reading experience I would definitely recommend reading in longer stretches. I had a lot going on when I started this and had to read in short bursts, so I did struggle to remember the characters and become fully immersed in the story. It was great to be able to read in long sections from then on and really lose myself in the story. I also think that in order to truly enjoy a story we need to engage with one of the characters, but I found that difficult to do in this novel. I really didn’t like anyone, even before their past was revealed. If anybody, I think Amelie was the one we were supposed to identify with, but for some reason this didn’t happen for me. This wasn’t just because these characters have done some terrible things, but because they felt as unreal to me as the island itself. These are not people I meet in everyday life, but then I live in a very rural part of the country and so my experience is possibly limited. Social media influencers and financiers are few and far between in Lincolnshire where you’re more likely to meet a farmer, gamekeeper or home carer. I really came away from it thinking this was a world far outside my social and economic experience.

This may say a lot about my character, but the most fascinating parts of the novel come when the characters are at odds with each other or under pressure. There’s a scene between Brenda, the banker, that’s almost Biblical! She is lured away to a quiet spot with a delicious looking picnic, but a nightmarish snake is lurking and starts to slowly wind itself around her leg. For someone with a snake phobia, this was a really vivid scene and hinted that perhaps the technology could root out each participants greatest fears. The following descriptions of Brenda’s leg, as the others try and get her to the big house before the poison takes hold, are horrific. In her pride she hasn’t wanted to tell them she was bitten, but her leg swells and changes colour dramatically and the tension created by the time scale on the injury really added urgency to the narrative.

I think the author had a brilliant premise. She has married our fear of modern technological advances with a good old-fashioned mystery in the style of Agatha Christie. You don’t know who is going to be picked off next. I did feel a bit side-swiped by the ending. It came suddenly and felt a little like the exposition of a Bond film with a villain hiding in his luxury home in an island, playing god with the guests lives. I think Susi Holliday is an incredibly talented writer. I struggled to fully engage with it though and it didn’t reach the heights of her last novel Violet which was one of my books of the year in 2019. However, if you like mysteries, morally questionable characters, and a bit of sci-fi thrown in then this might be the perfect book for you.

Meet The Author

.J.I. (Susi) Holliday grew up in East Lothian, Scotland. A life-long fan of crime and horror, her short stories have been published in various places, and she was shortlisted for the inaugural CWA Margery Allingham prize. She now lives in London (except when she is in Edinburgh) and loves to travel the world. She has written three crime novels set in the fictional Scottish town of Banktoun, which are a mix of police procedural and psychological thriller. They are: “Black Wood”, “Willow Walk” and “The Damselfly” – all featuring the much loved character, Sergeant Davie Gray.

Her serial killer thriller “The Deaths of December” (written as Susi Holliday), featuring Detective Sergeant Eddie Carmine and Detective Constable Becky Greene was a festive hit in 2017. Her spooky mystery “The Lingering” was released in September 2018, followed by “Violet” – a psychological thriller set on the Trans-Siberian Express – in September 2019. “Violet” has been optioned for film. Writing as Susi Holliday (again!) her next two releases, “The Last Resort” and “Substitute” are due out from Thomas & Mercer late 2020 and summer 2021 – both of these books are suspense thrillers with a technological element (a blend of Black Mirror, Tales of the Unexpected and The Twilight Zone).

Publisher: Mantle

Published: 1st April 2021

ISBN: : 978-1529037395

Anna Wharton’s debut, The Imposter, is a gripping story of obsession, loneliness and the lies we tell ourselves in order to live with ourselves . . .

I wanted to put out a preview of this debut novel by Anna Wharton because I enjoyed it so much. The novel follows a young woman by the name of Chloe whose background in care has lead to an isolated and lonely existence in the world.

Chloe lives a quiet life. Working as a newspaper archivist in the day and taking care of her Nan in the evening, she’s happy simply to read about the lives of others as she files away the news clippings from the safety of her desk.

But there’s one story that she can’t stop thinking about. The case of Angie Kyle – a girl, Chloe’s age, who went missing as a child. A girl whose parents never gave up hope.

When Chloe’s Nan gets moved into a nursing home, leaving Chloe on the brink of homelessness, she takes a desperate step: answering an ad to be a lodger in the missing girl’s family home. It could be the perfect opportunity to get closer to the story she’s read so much about. But it’s not long until she realizes this couple aren’t all they seem from the outside . . .

But with everyone in the house hiding something, the question is – whose secrets are the most dangerous?

I loved this book because of its portrayal of someone potentially living with borderline personality disorder. Chloe is rootless and with her Nan taken away, she is also purposeless. Losing her job at her beloved archive is disastrous, because it is as if her last mooring rope is cut. When she becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Angela Kyle. Borderline personalities tend to have a disorganised background, and exhibit impulsive behaviour. They also have very intense but short relationships, a description that fits Chloe perfectly. She moves into the Kyle’s home and forms an intense bond with Maureen; they are a mother who has lost a daughter and a daughter who has never known maternal love. As the tension builds I couldn’t stop reading and went on late into the night. It also has a double reveal at the end – one of which had me wanting to start reading again!

My review will be out near publication day, but I want to thank Anna Wharton and NetGalley for my proof copy in exchange for an honest review.

I loved Alix E. Harrow’s Ten Thousand Doors of January so much that it was in my top ten books of last year, so I approached her new novel with excitement, but some trepidation too. Could it possibly live up to her last work? Yet with promises of suffragettes, spells, anarchy and sister witches how could it possibly fail? I soon realised that this was going to be a very different book, embedded in American history but from a magical and feminist angle. Our main protagonists are the Eastwood sisters – Agnes Amaranth (the mill girl), Beatrice Belladonna (the librarian and researcher) and finally James Jupiter, the youngest sister with a wild streak and fierce loyalty to her sisters. This is New Salem, 1893, and since the burnings there haven’t been witches in this part of the world. However, snippets of the words and ways of witchcraft remain, hiding in plain sight. In the lullaby a mother uses to soothe her child, in the rhyme from a children’s game and even in recipe books. These are women’s spaces, and this old wisdom, that sits within the fairytale women tell their children at bedtime is accessible to anyone, once you realise it is there. The power lies dormant at a time when women are fighting more than ever to have a share in power at the ballot box. When the three sisters join the suffragettes of New Salem, they start to realise some of the power that Bella has been researching at the library. They each possess a different type of power and with the right ways and words they could wield it against those shadowy figures who would rather not see a witch live, let alone vote.

Although I struggled a little at first with the girls names, especially where there were other characters to remember, it was Bella who seemed to stick with me most at this point in the story. I think it’s because she was a gatherer of stories, so I felt an affinity with her. She comes to understand witchcraft from re intellectual perspective, she is studying and making sense of it from books, but gradually through first hand research. I loved that her research takes her to every corner of the community: from the local mill women and children’s rhymes; to the more marginalised black and Native American communities. She finds that women have been hiding their wisdom in a wealth of ways. On her travels she also finds the alluring Miss Cleopatra Quinn, who trusts Bella enough to disclose a society of black women, possibly the most marginalised group in society, who have a lot of shared knowledge including a set of secret tunnels under New Salem that prove very useful as the story progresses. The relationship between these women is one of the high points of the book for me and shows that the usually bookish and almost spinsterish Bella has unexpected reserves of passion.

This is a very character driven novel and comes alive when the sisters are together on the page. Agnes is the mill working girl, fired up by the rights of the women she works side by side with. Her need for witching comes from that lack of power, from knowing what it’s like to be hungry and not wanting that for her own children. I love that these girls don’t come from the big house on the hill with pots of money behind them; they come from a family blighted by poverty, the loss of their mother and a violent father. Jupiter particularly seems haunted by that past and there are secrets to be uncovered here. She is the more natural witch, the wild barefoot girl who has magic in her bones. She is furious when the other sisters get a familiar before she does. I also love that she walks with a cane and this cane is her strength throughout, not just something to lean on. Very cleverly the author weaves these marginalised people into the narrative and it’s refreshing to see these characters where their colour, sexuality or disability isn’t the story.

Harrow weaves together so much history here with folklore, myth and fairy tales. Our villain of the piece is an aspiring politician – which probably says more about our times than the story – but underneath he is something altogether different. He hates witches and possibly women too. He wants to use the ballot box for legitimacy, but his actions are those of a dictator. He amasses a group of enforcers for weeding out sedition, suffragettes and witchcraft. It is Jupiter who first sees what he truly is in a horrifying scene in the ‘Deeps’ – a basement prison that fills with water. Like the sisters he appears to have a ‘glamour’, a way of appearing to other people that masks the true face. It takes time for the sisters to realise they are in an age old battle, replayed across the centuries but they are determined that this time the witch will win. There are heart stopping scenes such as Agnes going into labour, or final confrontation that are visceral and heart rending. Harrow doesn’t hold back on the horror of how witches have been treated historically and their nemesis here is particularly cruel. The final confrontation isn’t just heart rending, it’s heart stopping. I couldn’t put the book down at that point because I was so emotionally invested in the sisters and their cause. Harrow does this to me. I always think that the fantasy elements will distance me from my heroes suffering, but then something will happen that floors me emotionally. I think there’s an incredible skill in creating this whole world of magic, but then connecting the reader to your characters so strongly that they feel their pain and their triumphs. I have loved spending time in this particular world and I’m so happy that for this reader, Harrow has done it again.