Out running an errand, Valeria Cossati gives in to a sudden impulse – she buys a shiny black notebook. She starts keeping a diary in secret, recording her concerns about her daughter, fears her husband will discover her new habit and the constant churn of the domestic routine. With each entry Valeria plunges deeper into her interior life, uncovering profound dissatisfaction and restlessness. As she finds her own voice, the roles that have come to define her-as wife, as mother, as daughter-begin to break apart.
Forbidden Notebook is a rediscovered jewel of Italian literature, published here in a new translation by the celebrated Ann Goldstein and with a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri. A captivating feminist classic, it is an intimate, haunting story of domestic discontent in postwar Rome, and of one woman’s awakening to her true thoughts and desires.
Alba de Céspedes y Bertini (11 March 1911 – 14 November 1997) was a Cuban-Italian writer.
De Céspedes worked as a journalist in the 1930s for Piccolo, Epoca, and La Stampa. In 1935, she wrote her first novel, L’Anima Degli Altri. Her fiction writing was greatly influenced by the cultural developments that lead to and resulted from World War II. In her writing, she instills her female characters with subjectivity. In her work, there is a recurring motif of women judging the rightness or wrongness of their actions. In 1935, she was jailed for her anti-fascist activities in Italy. Two of her novels were also banned (Nessuno Torna Indietro (1938) and La Fuga (1940)). In 1943, she was again imprisoned for her assistance with Radio Partigiana in Bari where she was a Resistance radio personality known as Clorinda. From June 1952 to the late 1958 she wrote an advice column, called Dalla parte di lei, in the magazine Epoca. She wrote the screenplay for the Michelangelo Antonioni 1955 film Le Amiche. Her work was also part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1936 Summer Olympics.
After the war she went to live in Paris. Although her books were bestsellers, De Céspedes has been overlooked in recent studies of Italian women writers. (Taken from Wikipedia)
A women-in-horror anthology edited by Lindy Ryan. Foreword by Christina Henry.
Into the Forest features twenty-three new and exclusive stories inspired by the Baba Yaga—the witch of Slavic folklore—written by some of today’s leading women-in-horror. Featured contributors include Bram Stoker Award® winners and nominees Gwendolyn Kiste, Stephanie M. Wytovich, Mercedes M. Yardley, Monique Snyman, Donna Lynch, Lisa Quigley, and R. J. Joseph, among others, as well as New York Times bestselling author Jacqueline West, and an introduction by novelist Christina Henry. The collection also features a poem from Bram Stoker Award® winning poet, Stephanie M. Wytovich, and pieces penned by “freshly hatched” voices of women-in-horror from around the globe
Deep in the dark forest, in a cottage that spins on birds’ legs behind a fence topped with human skulls, lives the Baba Yaga. A guardian of the water of life, she lives with her sisters and takes to the skies in a giant mortar and pestle, creating tempests as she goes. Those who come across the Baba Yaga may find help, or hinderance, or horror.
She is wild, she is woman, she is witch—and these are her tales.
Edited by Lindy Ryan (Under Her Skin), this collection brings together some of today’s leading voices of women-in-horror as they pay tribute to the baba yaga, and go Into the Forest. Each story reflects the wild and temperamental nature of the Baba Yaga, ranging from dark fantasy and folklore to horror as each go deep in the dark forest, and the diverse and inclusive experiences of women as they look to Baba Yaga as their muse.
Lindy Ryan is a bestselling and multi-award-winning author-editor-director with numerous titles in development for film/television adaptation. An award-winning professor, Lindy has published two textbooks on visual data analytics as well as numerous papers and chapters. She also writes seasonal romance as Lindy Miller and is the author of the forthcoming books-to-film Renovate My Heart and The Magic Ingredient. Lindy currently serves as a board member for the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) and was named a 2020 Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree. She is an active member and staff volunteer for the Horror Writers Association.
Christina Henry is the best-selling author of the BLACK WINGS series featuring Agent of Death Madeline Black and her popcorn-loving gargoyle Beezle. She enjoys running long distances, reading anything she can get her hands on and watching movies with samurai, zombies and/or subtitles in her spare time. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son.
My thoughts: as a child the only witch I was afraid of was Baba Yaga, all of the fairy tales, myths and legends I read, all of the scary things dwelling in the pages but only an old woman in a house on chicken legs, with a fence made of bones, who travels in a giant pestle and mortar, terrified me.
This excellent collection of poems, short stories and reimaginings reignited the finger of fear that Baba Yaga left in my spine as a child. I can’t pick a favourite piece, they’re all so good. And while all of the authors are women, they’re a diverse crowd and bring their unique styles and backgrounds to these tales. While the Baba Yaga originated in Slavic countries and the most famous version is Russian, she resonates in many cultures and traditions, the old woman whose sometimes young, sometimes one or three, and sometimes she’s you, or me…
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
After Agatha: Women Write Crime is the first book to examine how British, American, and Canadian female crime writers pursue their craft and what they think about crime writing. Hundreds of women who identified as lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, able-bodied, disabled, feminist, left or right wing, who were black or white, who had experienced violence, sexism, homophobia or racism, and who came from big cities or small country villages had one thing in common: they read crime novels.
The book explores why so many women who face fear and violence in their daily lives, should be so addicted to crime fiction, many of which feature extreme violence. The book analyzes why criminal justice professionals including police officers, forensic scientists, probation officers, and lawyers have joined traditional detective writers in writing crime. It examines the explosions of crime writing by women between 1930 and today. It highlights the UK Golden Age women writers, the 1950s American women novelists, the 80s experimental trio, Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton, who created the first female American private Investigators, and the important emergence of female police protagonists, as well as those central characters who for the first time were lesbian, disabled, black, or ethnic minority. After Agatha also examines the significant explosions of domestic noir thrillers and forensic science writers.
Most have taken to crime in order to reflect and comment on the social and political landscape around them. Many are creatively exploring the significant issues facing women today.
Agatha Christie – photo via BBC
Sally Cline, author of 13 books, is an award-winning biographer and fiction writer. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and former Advisory Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. Her biography on Radclyffe Hall, now a classic, was shortlisted for the LAMBDA prize; Lifting the Taboo: Women, Death and Dying won the Arts Council Prize for nonfiction; and she wrote landmark biographies on Zelda Fitzgerald and Dashiell Hammett. She is co-Series Editor for Bloomsbury’s 9 volume Writers and Artists Companions. Formerly lecturing at Cambridge University, she has degrees and masters from Durham and Lancaster Universities and was awarded a D.Litt in International Writing.
My thoughts: I am a huge crime fiction fan and adore Agatha Christie. I also studied English Literature at uni, including a module where we looked at crime fiction – all of the books on the reading list were written by men. Women writers were shunted off into their own module and focused on the Brontës, Austen and other 18th and 19th century writers. No crime fiction, no Golden Age.
Considering the immense popularity of crime novels, many written by women, and the history – which this book explores, that’s rather frustrating and I really hope that things have changed since the early to mid 00s, when I was studying.
This fascinating book has left me with an immense reading list (I’ve read many of the authors mentioned but not all and not enough as far as I’m concerned) and lots to think about. Digging deep into the legacy of Christie and her compatriots (Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allington – aka The Golden Age writers) and following the growth, expansion and creation of the women who wrote and starred in hundreds of crime novels since then.
It looks at the sub-genres, like PIs, the psychological, forensic and others, as well as the fact that readers of crime fiction are overwhelmingly women and why.
Absolutely fascinating and crammed full of interesting information, this is a must read for anyone interested in the genre, in women’s writing and literary history.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
She had saved her. But at what a cost! Her position, her name, her character – she had given them all, but Clarissa was hers. Upon the death of her mother, Agatha Bodenham finds herself alone for the first time in her life. Solitary and socially awkward by nature, she starts to dream about her imaginary childhood friend – the only friend she ever had. Much to her surprise, Clarissa starts to appear, fleetingly at first, and engage with her, and eventually becomes visible to everyone else. Agatha, a 32-year- old spinster, must explain the child’s ‘sudden’ appearance. In a moment of panic, she pretends that Clarissa is her own daughter, her love child. Olivier constructs a mother/daughter relationship which is both poignant and playful. As the years roll by and Clarissa grows into a beautiful young woman, Agatha’s love becomes increasingly obsessive as she senses Clarissa slipping away, attracted by new interests and people her own age.
Edith Olivier (1872–1948) Biography
Edith Olivier’s life encompassed the conservative and the bohemian in quite an extraordinary way: the circles she moved in later in life could not have been predicted from her upbringing. Born on the last day of 1872, Olivier was one of ten children of the Canon of Wilton and the granddaughter of a bishop. Though she had no formal schooling, or even a governess for much of her childhood, Olivier won a scholarship to St Hugh’s College (then St Hugh’s Hall) at Oxford University (see page 163). While there, she got to know Charles Dodgson – also known as Lewis Carroll. She had to leave after four terms, due to severe asthma.
In 1916, Olivier helped form the Women’s Land Army in Wiltshire, which became a model for a national scheme (see page 177). In 1920, she was awarded an MBE for this work. Wilton and Wiltshire remained important to Olivier throughout her life, and she was mayor of Wilton in 1938–41.
It wasn’t until Olivier was in her fifties that she turned to writing, after the death of her dearest sister, Mildred. The Love Child was her first novel in 1927, started when the idea came to her in the middle of the night: ‘Before morning I had finished two chapters,’ she relates in her autobiography (see page 141). The novel reflects Olivier’s keen belief in the supernatural, or what she called ‘things past explaining’ – for instance, she believed herself to have witnessed a pre-1800 fair at Avebury stone circles (see page 145), and to have seen the lost city of Lyonesse off the coast of Cornwall, a legendary kingdom that was supposedly submerged in the eleventh century (see page 157).
After The Love Child, four other novels followed by 1932, after which she turned her attention to non- fiction, including biographies of Alexander Cruden (who wrote a concordance to the Bible) and Mary Magdalene.
From childhood, she had aspired to a more creative life – the title of her autobiography, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley, is a lament on never having become an actor and thus not knowing Mr Walkley, the dramatic critic of the Times. But Olivier’s late career as a writer brought her to a new social circle, and she got to know many of the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the period. The artist and illustrator Rex Whistler was a particularly close friend, and others included Cecil Beaton, Siegfried Sassoon, William Walton and the Sitwell family. When Olivier died in 1948, Cecil Beaton noted that she was mourned by ‘young and old, those who had shared in her widely different interests’, recognised both as a bohemian creative and as a celebrator of Wiltshire.
About this Series
A curated collection of forgotten works by early to mid-century women writers. The best middlebrow fiction from the 1910s to the 1960s, offering escapism, popular appeal and plenty of period detail to amuse, surprise and inform. Stories about women’s lives, often written, performed and directed by women, are becoming more and more popular among audiences of film and TV series. The Women Writers series taps into this growing trend.
My thoughts: this is an interesting little story about loneliness and wish fulfilment. Agatha is alone after her mother’s death and remembers her childhood imaginary friend – another girl like herself, called Clarissa. My imaginary friends were penguins and rabbits, I think I wanted to be a zookeeper! But for an only child, it makes sense to imagine a playmate.
In this case however, Agatha is now in her 30s, unmarried, possibly as a “surplus woman” following the First World War, and childless. This version of Clarissa is as much a daughter as a companion. But she slowly becomes more real, appearing to others, eating, drinking and growing up. Gradually Agatha’s hold on her becomes weakened and Agatha fears she might lose her.
There’s a terrible sadness at the heart of this story, it reminded me of The Little Prince a bit – this magical creature from the stars, who leaves behind a sadness at their parting. The afterword compares its genesis (as per the author’s own recollection) to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a story born from a dream. Much like Agatha’s imagining into being of Clarissa.
The author herself seems to be have been an incredible and fascinating woman, studying at Oxford where she knew Lewis Carroll, then helping found the Women’s Land Army during the Second World War. The extracts from her autobiography included in this edition were almost more compelling a read than the story.
It’s why the British Library’s work in bringing these women writers and their books back into print is so important. When I studied Literature at university, even in a module called Women Writers, the focus was on ones we all know – Brontes, Austen, Eliot, Woolf, etc. Not these equally fascinating, but somehow forgotten writers. I have enjoyed everyone I’ve read so far and am pleased more are to come.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
The doomed mutual attraction of a middle-aged widow and her new son-in-law, who is much closer to her own age than her daughter’s, forms the central drama in this social comedy with tragic overtones.
Joanna Malling lost her husband in the first year of their marriage. At the age of 21 she was left with a baby daughter to raise alone. Now twenty years later, Libby is herself a grown woman living in London, and Joanna buys a new home to begin the next stage of her life. But her solitary existence is about to be shattered when Libby announces she is engaged. And with a change of job for her new husband Steven, the newly married couple move in with Joanna. What starts as an uneasy relationship between Joanna and Steven develops into something much more intimate and reminds Joanna of all she has missed out on. With Libby growing suspicious, Joanna must make a heart-rending decision.
The author: Diana Tutton (1915–1991) was a British writer whose novels focused on taboo relationships and family dysfunctionality. In the Second World War she drove a WVS mobile canteen, before she followed her husband to Kenya and joined the FANYs. In 1948 the family moved to British Malaya where she wrote her three novels. Mamma was published in 1956.
My thoughts: I have enjoyed discovering new-to-me women writers through this British Library project (I also really like their Classic Crime series too) so was delighted to be asked to review Mamma.
You might think that the 1950s were very staid and writers never covered anything eyebrow raising or taboo, but you’d be wrong. Diana Tutton is proof of that. Her books were about some very shocking subjects, including incest, and this one is about a doomed and never acted upon romance between a woman and her daughter’s new husband.
Joanna is only 5 years older than Steven and resents the idea that she should just fade into widowhood, she’s not even comfortable with the idea that her daughter is old enough to get married at 20. Her frustrations about the roles society boxes women into are genuine and haven’t hugely changed since the 50s – Maiden, Mother, Crone is a trope from the Ancient World that persists.
This makes her see Steven, 15 years older than Libby, differently. She isn’t initially very keen on him and worries about the age gap between him and her daughter, the life experiences are so different. But Libby insists it doesn’t matter. And it isn’t until circumstances force them into sharing Joanna’s house that she realises her indifference is really something more.
I found this compelling and utterly fascinating, both for what it has to say about women and also the plot, which is slow burn and sneaks up on you. What seems like a gentle domestic tale is much more, but not apparent on first glance. I felt for Joanna, for the way she’s forced into roles and made to act like a woman much older, when at 41 she’s still fairly young and if she were around now would be seen quite differently.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
The first biography of the bestselling author and journalist Marguerite Jervis Daughter of an officer of the Indian Medical Corps, Florence Laura Jarvis (1886 – 1964) was born in Marguerite Burma and became one of the most successful novelists of her time .
During the course of her 60-year career, Marguerite published over 150 books, with 11 novels adapted for film, including The Pleasure Garden (1925), the directorial debut of Alfred Hitchcock. In her heyday she sold hundreds of thousands of novels, but is now largely forgotten; under numerous pseudonyms she wrote for newspapers, women’s magazines and the silent movie screen; she married one of Wales most controversial literary figures, Caradoc Evans.
She also trained as an actress and was a theatrical impresario. Known variously as Mrs Caradoc Evans, Oliver Sandys, Countess Barcynska and many other pseudonyms, who was she really?
Liz Jones has dug deep beneath the tale told in Marguerite Jervis’s own somewhat romanticised memoir to reveal what made this driven and determined woman. And what turned her from a spoilt child of the English middle classes to a workaholic who could turn her hand to any literary endeavour and who became a runaway popular success during the most turbulent years of the 20th century.
Liz Jones writes drama and creative non-fiction, reviews, short stories and journalism ranging from Take a Break to New Welsh Review. Along the way she has raised two daughters, tried to change the world, worked in a café-cum-bookshop, a housing association, in community development and lifelong learning. She is now a Teaching Fellow at Aberystwyth University.
My thoughts: this was a really interesting book. I hadn’t heard of Marguerite Jarvis or any of her aliases. Even studying English Literature for years, she never crossed my path as a writer. Which is a shame. Her life was more interesting than fiction. She reinvented herself so many times, as a writer, a “countess”, a theatre owner. Her books were made into films during the silent era, and then adapted into plays for her theatre company.
I really enjoyed learning about this interesting and colourful woman, her life, marriages and work. Her devotion to her last husband, Welsh writer Caradoc Evans, and her son Nicholas meant she never stopped writing, desperate for money to support them. It’s a shame her books seem to be hard to get hold of these days, yes I looked, as while they’re not particularly fashionable, they’re a part of literary history.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
Widely regarded as a modern classic, The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman’s life; that of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman born in Canada in 1905. Beautifully written and deeply compassionate, it follows Daisy’s life through marriage, widowhood, motherhood, and old age, as she charts her own path alongside that of an unsettled century.
A subtle but affective portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life, this multi-award-winning story deals with everyday issues of existence with an extraordinary vibrancy and irresistible flair.
Beautifully written and deeply compassionate, it follows Daisy’s life through marriage, widowhood, motherhood, and old age, as she charts her own path alongside that of an unsettled century.
A subtle but affective portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life, this multi-award-winning story deals with everyday issues of existence with an extraordinary vibrancy and irresistible flair.
Carol Shields (1935–2003) was born in the United States, and emigrated to Canada when she was 22. She is acclaimed for her empathetic and witty, yet penetrating insights into human nature. Her most famous novel
Her most famous novel The Stone Diaries was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, along with the Governor General’s Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Happenstance was praised as her tour de force, masterly combining two novels in one. The international bestseller Mary Swann was awarded with the Arthur Ellis Award for best Canadian mystery, while The Republic of Love was chosen as the first runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize.
In 2020, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, a North American literary award dedicated to writing by women, was set up in her honor.
Her work has been published in over 30 languages.
My thoughts:
I hadn’t heard of Carol Shields before, and from the foreword it seems she’s not hugely well known in the UK.
I found The Stone Diaries really interesting, although I was a little confused as to who the narrative voice was at times – it seems to be Daisy but uses the third person, an interesting stylistic choice.
Charting Daisy’s life from birth to death, from Canada to the US and back again, the writing draws you into the family saga with Daisy at the heart. From daughter to wife to mother to grandmother, Daisy’s passage through life seems both easy and at times very complicated.
Mixing letters, family members’ recollections and Daisy’s own thoughts, this is a thought provoking look at women in the 20th Century, with Daisy as a sort of everywoman.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
Star-studded and beautifully written, this collection of diverse stories about love and desire by South Asian-heritage British Muslim women authors, including Ayisha Malik and Shelina Janmohamed.
Although outsiders often expect Muslim women to be timid, conservative, or submissive, the reality is different. While some of these authors express a quiet piety and explore poignant situations, others use black humour and biting satire, or play with possibilities.
Still others shade into the territory of a Muslim Fifty Shades of Grey, creating grey areas where the mainstream media sees only black and white. If grooming-gang scandals grab headlines, characters are more scandalized by suitors’ sloppy personal grooming.
Finding the right crimson lipstick for a date or the perfect power outfit for meeting a cheating ex-husband are commoner preoccupations than the news.
Stylish but far from shallow, the stories also reflect on migration, racism, arranged marriage, gender differences, lesbian desire, bearding, and many other subjects.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Claire Chambers teaches postcolonial literature the University of York. Her fascination with Muslim South Asia was sparked by a teenage year spent in Peshawar.
Nafhesa Ali is a sociologist and the lead postdoctoral researcher for the Storying Relationship project at Sheffield University. She researches gender, age, the life course, and methods.
Richard Phillips is a geographer and Storying Relationships’ principal investigator at Sheffield University. His research interests include contemporary multiculturalism and the world after Empire.
All three authors live in the UK.
My thoughts:
This was an interesting collection of short stories centred around love and the Muslim perspective, as written by women living in the UK.
Some of the stories are funny, some sad, one has a possibly demonic cat determined to cause chaos. Some of them made me think about my friends and the conversations we’ve had about sex and relationships.
There’s this weird belief that Muslim women have no agency of their own, and that they’re under mens’ thumbs, clad in hijab and niqab against their will and it jars so harshly against reality.
My Muslim friends are clever, funny, weird, silly and completely normal. Their religion doesn’t dictate their lives, some of them are married, some aren’t. Even among the married ones some chose their own spouse and others went for an arranged marriage (and unlike some people believe, they had a say).
Collections like this one help to redress the balance against the strange stereotype of Muslim women. Showing different facets of life, from writing erotica to pay the bills, finding a (second or third) husband, fending off annoying relatives or buying the perfect red lipstick.
Universal experiences that anyone can relate to, regardless of religion, bring us closer together and help foster better understanding and relationships.
I really enjoyed this book and have some new authors to investigate (although I spotted some familiar names amongst the included writers). The project that spawned this collection sounds really interesting and I hope similar ones produce more enjoyable and enlightening reads.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
A revised edition of the publisher’s inaugural publication in 1990 which won the Pandora Award from Women-in-Publishing. Inspirational in its original format, this new edition offers insight and motivation for budding writers from dozens of distinguished authors, celebrating the breadth of women’s writing in all its forms. Also includes the original writing workshops from the first edition plus quirky B/W illustrations as well as a foreword by Cheryl Robson, publisher and Managing Editor, who was a recent finalist in the ITV National Diversity Awards – Lifetime Achievement category. Aurora Metro Books was a finalist in the 2019 IPG Diversity in Publishing Awards and has a 30 year history of ground-breaking publishing, featuring both diverse and international authors.
The complete list of contributors:
A.S. Byatt, Saskia Calliste, April De Angelis, Kit de Waal, Carol Ann Duffy, Sian Evans, Philippa Gregory, Mary Hamer, Jackie Kay, Shuchi Kothari, Bryony Lavery, Annee Lawrence, Roseanne Liang, Suchen Christine Lim, Jackie McCarrick, Laura Miles, Raman Mundair, Magda Oldziejewska, Kaite O’Reilly, Jacqueline Pepall, Gabi Reigh, Djamila Ribeiro, Fiona Rintoul, Jasvinder Sanghera, Anne Sebba, Kalista Sy, Debbie Taylor, Madeleine Thien, Claire Tomalin, Ida Vitale, Sarah Waters, Emma Woolf
A wide-ranging collection of over 30 essays, poems and interviews from top, international women writers, poets, screen writers and journalists.
20% of profits to go to the Virginia Woolf statue campaign.
The Virginia Woolf statue campaign: The proposed statue will be located in Richmond on Thames where Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived from 1914-1924 and set up the Hogarth Press. A public consultation by the local council was 83% in favour of the statue and planning permission has been granted to site the first life-size statue in bronze of the famous author on Richmond riverside where the author walked her dog daily. Over 20% of the £50,000 target has been raised so far.
This is a fascinating, engaging and timely collection of essays, interviews, poems and other short pieces by women on a range of topics from feminism to writing, written by an incredible selection of writers.
Not a cover to cover read but more something to dip in and out of, I very much enjoyed learning more about some of my favourite writers, like Sarah Waters and Kit de Waal, as well as new to me writers.
This is an excellent way to celebrate women’s writing and raise funds for a statue of Virginia Woolf, one of our most intriguing and talented writers. A Room of One’s Own was on my Women Writers syllabus at university and has stuck with me ever since. A powerful argument for women to be seen as important as men in terms of their work and given space to do so.
Every woman, especially those who write, needs a copy of this inspiring collection.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
I do like a good psychological thriller and this is a cracker.
Erin Kelly has written a heck of a book, and the twists keep on coming.
Most of the story is told from the viewpoint of Laura, with some chapters by her partner Kit. Both are witnesses to a crime that brings them into contact with Beth, who might be dangerous or is she?
Eyewitness testimony is a rather complex subject (I live with an expert on it) but it’s the fallout of the case Laura and Kit testify at that drives the drama in the narrative. Eventually Laura is living her life in ongoing terror and spiralling anxiety, something I can relate to (though thankfully not in the same circumstances).
I did not expect the clever twist at the end, which flips the plot on its head – no spoilers here.
I highly recommend you pick up a copy and read it asap.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 