Book Review – Dwell by Rue Baldry @northodoxpress #20BOS26

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About the Book

January 1919. A new gardener at a snowbound boarding school catches everyone’s attention. It’s rumoured he is a war hero.

He’s nineteen-year-old Albert, haunted by Great War experiences and fighting the temptation of one particular prefect. What they want is illegal. Being caught would ruin them. 

Then Albert’s past finds him, making their quest for a place where love can safely dwell look impossible.

Format: Paperback (336 pages) Publisher: Northodox Press
Publication date: 11th June 2026 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Dwell is an exquisitely told love story about two people whose attraction to each other is so strong that no obstacle must stand in the way of them being together, even though that brings with it great risk.

Despite being similar in age, Albert’s and Edgar’s life experiences couldn’t be more different. Edgar’s life so far has been one of privilege. His father is a successful solicitor and it’s expected Edgar will eventually join the family firm and marry well. His mother and his sister are already on the lookout for suitable candidates.

Albert grew up in poverty and joined up to escape his violent home life. Now the war is over, he’s adrift. The terrible things he experienced during his time on the front line, not all of which were perpetrated by the enemy, continue to haunt him. He suffers nightmares in which he recalls harrowing scenes. He has catatonic episodes and flashbacks, sometimes triggered by seemingly innocuous things. The reader shares Albert’s experience of these sudden shifts from present to past. In vividly drawn scenes we witness the horror of the battlefield, the ultimate demands of comradeship and the malevolent actions of those with power over life and death.

From their very first encounter, Edgar and Albert seem destined for each other. For Edgar, his attraction to Albert confirms the sense he’s had about his sexuality but has been unable to act on before. Albert is equally smitten but is conscious of Edgar’s innocence and inexperience. He also has a secret he fears would change how Edgar feels about him.

Both are aware of the risks they’re taking. Edgar knows discovery of their relationship could result in prosecution and disgrace, including for his family. Albert’s war experiences have left him with the notion that others have been punished for his ‘sin’ of being attracted to other men. What if Edgar too is punished because of Albert’s actions?

Ironically it is the difference in their social class that eventually provides a ‘cover’ for their relationship. Hidden in plain sight, if you like, but still not without risk because that thing in Albert’s past could still bring everything crashing down. It’s why Albert’s instinct is to remain in the shadows, to resist Edgar’s desire to venture out into the underground gay community. As it turns out, Albert was right to be wary.

I loved that, as well as the passion of Albert’s and Edgar’s relationship and their delight in each other’s bodies, we witness moments of tenderness and domestic intimacy: a reassuring embrace when awakening from a nightmare, the gentle application of lotion to inflamed skin, the drawing of a bath to soothe aching limbs, the preparation of an early morning cup of tea.

The author writes with real compassion and insight. By the end of the book I was totally invested in Albert and Edgar’s story and left with the profound hope they would be able to make a future together. It’s Albert though who will really stay with me.

Dwell is an emotionally charged, tender and compelling story of a love that must remain hidden. It’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

I received a proof copy courtesy of Northodox Press. Dwell is book 2 of my 20 Books of Summer.

In three words: Intense, intimate, moving
Try something similar: The Two Roberts by Damian Barr

About the Author

Rue Baldry has a BA in English Literature from York University and an MA in Literature with Creative Writing from Leeds University. She still lives in York, where she met her husband and they raised their five children. In 2015 she was a Jerwood/Arvon mentee, in 2017, the The Bridge Awards/ Moniack Mhor Emerging Writer, and in 2021, a Women’s Prize Discoveries longlistee.

Her novel, Dwell, won the 2024 First Novel Prize. Other work of hers has won the 2023 Canada and Europe region of the Commonwealth Prize, come second in the Yeovil Prize, been longlisted for the BBC NSSA, and placed in the Caledonian, Bridport, Reader Berlin, First Page, Odd Voice Out, Retreat West, and Flash 500 competitions.

Thirty of her short stories have been published in journals such as Granta, Ambit, MIR Online, Mslexia, The Honest Ulsterman, Fairlight Shorts, Fictive Dream, Litro, Postbox, and The Incubator. Her plays have had amateur performances and professional workshops. (Photo/bio: Publisher website)

Connect with Rue
Website | Facebook | X | Instagram | Bluesky

#WWWWednesday – 17th June 2026

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Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

What I’m Currently Reading

Murder at the End of the World by Akani Arake, translated by Jesse Kirkwood (ARC, Pushkin Vertigo)

An asteroid is hurtling towards Earth and the human race has just over two months to live. But twenty-three-year-old Haru, stargazer and chronic worrier, is still trying to pass her driving test.

Then she finds a body in the boot of her car: a woman, stabbed and tortured. There’s a murderer on the loose. And it turns out that Haru’s driving instructor is an ex-cop with a manic devotion to justice.

So, despite the small matter of an impending apocalypse, the two women team up to catch the culprit, no matter where it takes them.

After all, the world’s not quite over yet…

Land by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press)

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.

The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?

A Fatal Love by Louisa Treger (Bloomsbury via NetGalley)

It is Easter Sunday in 1955 and a young man lies face-down on the ground covered in blood. A woman, blonde and petite, stands over him with a gun in her hand. This is the story of Ruth Ellis as never told before…

As Ruth awaits her trial in Holloway Prison, she recollects growing up in England during the Second World War and the events that led to the death of her lover, David Blakely.

Meanwhile, Kitty Carrington – the assistant to Ruth’s trial lawyer – tries to forge her own path through the male-dominated legal world of the 1950s and ensure that Ruth receives a fair trial.

Navigating secrets, betrayal and a broken justice system, Ruth and Kitty try to take control of their own lives and narratives. But do we ever really know the full story?

What I’ve Just Read

Deception by Alan Parks (Baskerville)

Country People by Daniel Mason (John Murray)

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family.

So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, who possesses, in Kate’s, words, ‘a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere’. Soon he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales – from a ghostly tree surgeon, to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress, and a photographer of snowflakes – until at last he stumbles upon a bizarre local legend, which, he begins to suspect, might not be a legend at all. (Review to follow)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

Throw Away the Key by Jason M. Hough (eARC, Crooked Lane Books)

Lars Bergman is no ordinary janitor. He’s the CIA’s locksmith.

Formerly part of the CIA’s infamous Surreptitious Entry Team, Lars is now responsible for every padlock, safe, and secure door across the CIA headquarters. He’s never met a lock he couldn’t pick…except one, which he tried and failed to open during a botched mission in Warsaw at the end of the Cold War.

Cruising toward retirement, Lars’s life is upended when a senior CIA official dies and he’s called upon to open the safe in her office. Inside the safe is a clue only Lars would notice, left by someone he’d worked with in his heyday. As he investigates, Lars soon realizes that his failed Warsaw operation has come back to haunt him and perhaps give him another chance at picking the one lock that’s ever eluded him.

What Lars doesn’t realize is that what the lock is protecting could have dire ramifications for the organization he has spent his whole adult life safekeeping.