Tag: blogtour

#BlogTour #BookReview I Am Dust by Louise Beech @OrendaBooks

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Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for I Am Dust by Louise Beech. My thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to participate in the tour and to Orenda Books for my digital review copy. Do check out the post for my tour buddy, Jacob at Hooked From Page One.

I Am DustAbout the Book

When iconic musical Dust is revived twenty years after the leading actress was murdered in her dressing room, a series of eerie events haunts the new cast, in a bewitching, beguiling and terrifyingly dark psychological thriller…

The Dean Wilson Theatre is believed to be haunted by a long-dead actress, singing her last song, waiting for her final cue, looking for her killer…

Now Dust, the iconic musical, is returning after twenty years. But who will be brave enough to take on the role of ghostly goddess Esme Black, last played by Morgan Miller, who was murdered in her dressing room?

Theatre usher Chloe Dee is caught up in the spectacle. As the new actors arrive, including an unexpected face from her past, everything changes. Are the eerie sounds and sightings backstage real or just her imagination? Is someone playing games?

Is the role of Esme Black cursed? Could witchcraft be at the heart of the tragedy? And are dark deeds from Chloe’s past about to catch up with her?
Not all the drama takes place onstage. Sometimes murder, magic, obsession and the biggest of betrayals are real life.

When you’re in the theatre shadows, you see everything. And Chloe has been watching…

Format: Paperback (300 pages)          Publisher: Orenda Books
Publication date: 16 April 2020 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Thriller

Find I Am Dust on Goodreads

Pre-order/Purchase links*
Amazon.co.uk | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

“I’m still here; I am dust. I’m those fragments in the air, the gold light dancing there, the breeze from nowhere.”

The tagline on Louise Beech’s website is ‘Making Magic With Words’ and there’s more than a touch of magic, including of a dark kind, woven into I Am Dust.

With its numerous superstitions, the theatre naturally lends itself to being the setting for a story with a generous sprinkling of spooky goings-on, including radio messages that no-one else hears, writing on mirrors that no-one else sees, glimpses of shadowy figures in the auditorium or backstage, and doors that mysteriously open and close without warning. Those who have read her previous book, Call Me Star Girl, will appreciate the author’s ability to create a spine-chilling atmosphere from something as simple as an empty building late at night.

In Chloe, the author gives the reader an unflinching but always sensitively handled portrait of a troubled young woman. Chloe has always harboured ambitions to be an actress but, for the time being, has to make do with the role of usher at the now rather rundown Dean Wilson Theatre. Its glory has faded since the time the musical Dust premiered there, although the events of that night have given it a ghoulish notoriety. Now the shows it puts on are decidedly less iconic and more often than not play to sparse and not very appreciative audiences. (I suspect the author had a bit of fun inventing the shows. Please tell me the tribute act Pelvis Presley really exists.)

I did enjoy the depiction of the process of getting a show ready from initial read-throughs to set mock-ups and technical rehearsals, no doubt informed by the author’s own experience with the Hull Truck Theatre.

Alternating between the present day and fourteen years earlier, the reader sees a game involving Chloe and two teenage friends transform into something much darker. Although they do not know it then and will not fully realise it for many years, it will change the course of their lives forever. “We never forget. We choose not to remember.”

By the way, like those who stay at the end of a film to watch the credits roll in the hope of seeing a bonus scene or outtake, book bloggers who have taken part in tours for previous books by Louise will find a reward in her generous Acknowledgements section at the end of the book.

A skilfully crafted combination of crime mystery and ghost story, I Am Dust is an intensely atmospheric tale of ambition, obsession, desire and betrayal. 

In three words: Spooky, chilling, suspenseful

Try something similar: Call Me Star Girl by Louise Beech

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Louise Beech Author picAbout the Author

Louise Beech is an exceptional literary talent, whose debut novel How To Be Brave was a Guardian Readers’ Choice for 2015. Her second book, The Mountain in My Shoe was shortlisted for Not the Booker Prize. Both of her previous books, Maria in the Moon and The Lion Tamer Who Lost, were widely
reviewed, critically acclaimed and number-one bestsellers on Kindle. The Lion Tamer Who Lost was shortlisted for the RNA Most Popular Romantic Novel Award in 2019.

Her short fiction has won the Glass Woman Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award for Prose, and the Aesthetica Creative Works competition, as well as shortlisting for the Bridport Prize twice.

Louise lives with her husband on the outskirts of Hull, and loves her job as a Front of House Usher at Hull Truck Theatre, where her first play was performed in 2012.

Connect with Louise
Website | Twitter

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#BlogTour #BookReview Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell @TinderPress

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Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. My thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for giving me a slot on the tour and to Tinder Press for my digital review copy. Be sure to check out the posts by my tour buddies Juliet at Book Literati Book Reviews and Melanie at Melanie’s Reads.

HamnetAbout the Book

Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley Street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.

Award-winning author Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.

Format: Hardcover (384 pages)       Publisher: Tinder Press
Publication date: 31st March 2020 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find Hamnet on Goodreads

Purchase links*
Amazon.co.uk | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

Hamnet draws on the author’s abiding fascination with the little-known story behind Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet.  Because it is an established (if not necessarily widely-known) fact, having the reader aware from the outset that Hamnet will die is unavoidable. In other hands, it might reduce the narrative thrust of the book but in this case it only seems to increase the sense of anticipation and tension. With a feeling of foreboding, the reader knows it will happen but not exactly how and at what point in the book. I found that every positive thought, kindly action or interaction with another family member by Hamnet – however minor – increased the poignancy, acting as a constant reminder of the fine young person Hamnet might have become had he lived.

The author takes the unusual step of never mentioning by name William Shakespeare. Instead he is referred to in relation to other characters – he is Hamnet’s father, Agnes’s husband, the Latin tutor, the glovemaker’s son. It’s a move that helps to put Agnes front and centre of the story giving her more influence on events than she may have been able to exert in real life.

The narrative moves between different points of view, and back and forth in time between the days leading up to and after Hamnet’s death, and Agnes’ first meeting with her future husband and their subsequent very deliberate action to ensure they can be married. Agnes’s ‘gift’ of insight into future events only adds to the sense of foreboding previously mentioned. The reader knows she senses correctly what will happen but at the same time that she is mistaken about the way it will happen.

What I found particularly clever – and chillingly prescient given what’s going on at the moment – was the small section of the book that demonstrates how a chain of seemingly random interactions can have unforeseen and devastating consequences around the world.

When Hamnet’s death does occur, it’s clear it leaves a gaping hole in the family. ‘How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?’ The author describes with insight the different ways in which members of the family feel his absence. If only they had done this or that? If only they had noticed or acted earlier? I was particularly moved by the reaction of Hamnet’s twin sister, Judith.

Hamnet’s death also puts a strain on the marriage of Agnes and her husband, made greater by an act that initially Agnes struggles to understand – or forgive. It is only in the vibrant and moving final scene of the book, she finally appreciates that it is her husband’s way of grieving and that he has honoured the memory of their son in the only way he can, bringing him back to life if only for a few short hours.

Hamnet is a poignant portrait of a marriage, a family and the impact on both of the loss of a child.

In three words: Moving, poignant, emotional

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Maggie Author PicAbout the Author

Maggie O’Farrell is the author of the Sunday Times no. 1 bestselling memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, and eight novels: After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act Of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, Instructions For A Heatwave, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award, This Must Be The Place, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Novel Award, and Hamnet. She lives in Edinburgh.

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