Category: Reading Challenges

#BookReview The Night of the Flood by Zoë Somerville @HoZ_Books

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NightoftheFlood Blog TourWelcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Night of the Flood by Zoë Somerville, which will be published in hardback on 3rd September 2020. My thanks to Lauren at Head of Zeus for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my proof copy.

Somerville_The Night of the Flood_HBAbout the Book

Summer, 1952. Verity Frost, stranded on her family farm on the Norfolk coast, is caught between two worlds: the devotion of her childhood friend Arthur, just returned from National Service, and a strange new desire to escape it all. Arthur longs to escape too, but only with Verity by his side.

Into their world steps Jack, a charismatic American pilot flying secret reconnaissance missions off the North Sea coast. But where Verity sees adventure and glamour, Arthur sees only deception. As the water levels rise to breaking point, this tangled web of secrets, lies and passion will bring about a crime that will change all their lives.

Taking the epic real-life North Sea flood as its focus, The Night of the Flood is at once a passionate love story, an atmospheric thriller, and a portrait of a distinctive place in a time of radical social change.

Format: Hardcover (352 pages)              Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 3rd September 2020 Genre: Historical fiction

Find The Night of the Flood on Goodreads

Pre-order/Purchase links*
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*links provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

The Night of the Flood involves not one but several love triangles. And we all know that three into two doesn’t go, that there’s always one left over.

The four main characters all to some extent feel as if they are outsiders. Arthur arrived at Howe Farm, home of the Frost family, as a child evacuee but feels he no longer belongs there. Peter Frost feels isolated by his inability to express his true nature and his sister, Verity, finds the expectations that she will marry and start a family alien to her nature. The most obvious outsider is Jack Doherty, a pilot stationed at the nearby American air base. However, he exudes a confidence and easy charm that enables him to be absorbed into local society in a way someone like Arthur can only dream of. A fifth character, Muriel, floats on the periphery. Once a playmate of the Frost children, she now feels distanced from them by her family’s poverty and social status.

Many of the characters also share a sense of thwarted ambition. Arthur has returned from National Service disappointed with the experience. He has aspirations to be a writer or journalist but finds himself instead acting as delivery boy in his mother’s grocery shop. It doesn’t help that he harbours doubts about his relationship with Verity, his childhood sweetheart. His frustration at times manifests itself in violent thoughts. Peter finds himself landed with the task of trying to rescue the family farm from financial ruin caused by his father’s profligacy, unwillingness to embrace change and descent into despair following a family tragedy. Verity’s hopes of studying and travel seem likely to be thwarted at the first hurdle.

In creating such a complex web of relationships, the author has skilfully created the ingredients for a dramatic and enthralling story. At the centre of the web is Verity, although she seems unaware of this and the effect she has on men who, as one character puts it, circle her like dogs on heat.

Starting the story in the months before the flood creates a sense of tension and expectation. Added to this is the backdrop of fear of nuclear war and the beginnings of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. When the flood does finally occur it is both actual and metaphorical. There are dramatic scenes as people try to escape the rising seawater, rescue others and salvage homes and possessions. But the night of the flood also sees events that will have long-lasting repercussions. Like an ebb tide, it leaves Peter and others trying to piece together what, if anything, is left from the wreckage and come to terms with what has lost been forever.

The Night of the Flood is an absorbing story of secrets, obsession and thwarted desire.

In three words: Atmospheric, compelling, dramatic

Try something similar: Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller

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Zoe SomervilleAbout the Author

Zoë Somerville is a writer and English teacher. Having lived all over the world – Japan, France, Washington – she now lives in Bath with her family. After completing a creative writing MA at Bath Spa, Zoë started writing her debut novel, which is inspired by her home county, Norfolk, and the devastating North Sea flood of the 1950s.

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#BookReview A Prince of the Captivity by John Buchan #ReadJB2020

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A Prince of the CaptivityAbout the Book

Adam Melfort is an officer and a gentleman with a brilliant career ahead of him until he is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit.

Afterwards, he embarks on daring missions in the service of his country including espionage and dangerous work behind enemy lines in World War One.

Format: Hardcover (464 pages)  Publisher: Nelson
Publication date: September 1935 [1933] Genre: Fiction, Adventure, Classics

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My Review

My Buchan of the Month for August is A Prince of the Captivity which was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1933. My own copy is a later Nelson edition from September 1935 with its rather tatty dust jacket. You can read my earlier blog post introducing the book here.

The book opens in one of Buchan’s oft-used settings – a gentleman’s club – with a group of its members discussing the trial of Adam Melfort for forgery. Despite his defence counsel being none other than Sir Edward Leithen (first introduced in The Power House), Adam is found guilty and sent to prison. It means the end of a brilliant military career. The group cannot understand why Melfort should do something so out of character and, moreover, seem to welcome the punishment meted out to him.

When the point of view switches to Adam, the reader learns the motive behind his actions: a combination of misplaced guilt, chivalry and grief. As he languishes in prison, his one comfort is a repeated dream in which he revisits the Scottish island owned by his family where he spent childhood holidays. However, his sense of guilt is such that he feels the need to earn the right to go back there once his sentence is served. This leads him to embark on a series of adventures, seemingly heedless of the danger involved.

The first of these sees him go undercover in occupied territory during the First World War, gathering information useful to the Allies but also spreading misinformation. It’s no doubt informed by John Buchan’s own wartime roles as Director of Intelligence and Minister of Information. Next, Adam embarks on a mission to rescue Falconet, an American millionaire, lost in the frozen wastes of the Arctic. The scenes in which the two men over-winter in a small cave are brilliantly described.

Adam comes back from that experience convinced his role is to seek out the leadership the world needs in order to avoid another war, to be a “midwife to genius” as a character puts it. It is at this point he meets Warren Creevey who, like other Buchan villains, is possessed of a superlative intellect but not the moral scruples to go with it. As one character observes, “Tonight two remarkable men for the first time saw each his eternal enemy”. Unfortunately, the story then gets rather bogged down for a time as Adam explores contemporary politics and trade unionism in the city of Birkpool.

Things pick up again when the focus moves to Germany. Adam once more uses his remarkable linguistic skills and his ability to assume different identities to protect the Chancellor of Germany (a man he first met in very different circumstances during the war) from enemies who seek to prevent his attendance at a conference that might mean the difference between peace or another European war.

A Prince of the Captivity is at its best in the episodes of adventure, culminating in the final climactic scenes in the Alps, in which an earlier prophecy that “somewhen, somewhere, somehow you will do battle with him” becomes reality. The end of the book features familiar Buchan themes of sacrifice and duty. The less successful and, frankly, somewhat tedious parts of the novel are, as some critics have observed, a case of Buchan trying to cram too many ideas into one book. I wish also that he had relied less on racial stereotypes in his depiction of some of the characters. Nevertheless, the bits that are good are very good.

Next month’s Buchan of the Month is something quite different, The Magic Walking Stick. Published in 1932, it’s a children’s book and therefore will be a first time read for me.

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John BuchanAbout the Author

John Buchan (1875 – 1940) was an author, poet, lawyer, publisher, journalist, war correspondent, Member of Parliament, University Chancellor, keen angler and family man.  He was ennobled and, as Lord Tweedsmuir, became Governor-General of Canada.  In this role, he signed Canada’s entry into the Second World War.   Nowadays he is probably best known – maybe only known – as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps.  However, in his lifetime he published over one hundred books: fiction, poetry, short stories, biographies, memoirs and history.

You can find out more about John Buchan, his life and literary output by visiting The John Buchan Society website.

My John Buchan Bookcase