Tag: contemporary fiction

#BookReview #Ad Three Gifts by Mark A. Radcliffe @epoque_press

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Three Gifts Cover_FinalAbout the Book

If you could save the life of a loved one by trading in years of your own life, how many years would you give? How many lives could you save? Would you know when to stop?

Francis Broad has done just that and has negotiated the day of his death, now he must come to terms with the decisions he has made.

Three Gifts explores one man’s attempt to live a good life, his sense of responsibility, gratitude and what it means to love

Format: eARC (256 pages)                 Publisher: époque press
Publication date: 2nd March 2023 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

I’ve read several books published by époque press – El Hacho and Ghosts of Spring by Luis Carrasco, The Wooden Hill by Jamie Guiney and Seek the Singing Fish by Roma Wells – and not been disappointed yet.  I’m pleased to say Three Gifts continues that pattern.

I loved the way the book explores family relationships and friendship.  The tender relationship between Francis and his mother, Rose, is movingly described as is the young Francis’s feeling of bewilderment and powerlessness when his mother becomes ill.  ‘This isn’t fair because there is nothing I can do, there is never anything I can do.’ A chance (or is it?) encounter offers him the opportunity to do the ‘something’ he’s been looking for –  to give his mother and himself a gift beyond value: more time together.  He has the same motivation many years later when a random event risks losing the person – besides his wife, Victoria – he holds most dear.

Francis’s friendship with Ben and Joy is the sort of friendship I think we’d all like to have. There’s fun and laughter, generosity and understanding. It was both wonderfully uplifting and, at certain points, intensely moving.  And having Francis be a gardener with a desire to plant trees that will take years to grow to their full height but will persist after he’s gone was a clever touch.

Francis’s ‘trade’ is an act of willing self-sacrifice. But is trading years of your own life to prolong another’s actually the gift you think it is? What if it means you don’t live to see them grow up or fulfil their potential? Would they want you to have entered into such a contract if they’d known the consequence was spending less time with you? How would you approach the final days, hours, minutes of your life if you knew the precise point at which it would end?

In case you think this is sounding all rather serious and worthy, there’s also a lot of wry observation and humour in the book. For example, an arduous pregnancy is described as being like ‘a physical assault by surrealist plumbers’ and an act of sexual intimacy being like ‘two people trying to put on the same duffel coat in the dark’.

Whether you believe the ‘contract’ Francis enters into, and the events that follow, are the product of divine intervention, fate or simply coincidence, Three Gifts prompts you to think about what you would do in the same situation.

Three Gifts is a beautifully written, gentle and heartfelt story. It’s a book that will make you smile, laugh, ponder and maybe shed a tear or two. Personally, I don’t ask much more from a story.

My thanks to Sean at époque press for my digital review copy.

In three words: Tender, moving, engaging

Mark A RatcliffeAbout the Author

Mark A. Radcliffe is the author of two novels, Gabriel’s Angel (2010) and Stranger Than Kindness (2013), both published by Bluemoose and a collection of short stories, Superpowers (2020) published by Valley Press.

He is currently the Subject Lead for Creative Writing at West Dean College of Art and Conservation. Prior to that he worked as a nurse, a health journalist/columnist and a senior lecturer in mental health practice and nursing.

Mark lives in Hove with his wife Kate and swims in the sea a lot.

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#BookReview #Ad The Witch in the Well by Camilla Bruce

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The Witch in the WellAbout the Book

Over a hundred years ago, the citizens of F- did something rather bad. And local school teacher Catherine Evans has made writing the definitive account of what happened when Ilsbeth Clark drowned in the well her life’s work.

The town’s people may not want their past raked up, but Catherine is determined to shine a light upon that shameful event. For Ilsbeth was an innocent, after all. She was shunned and ostracised by rumour-mongers and ill-wishers and someone has to speak up for her. And who better than Catherine, who has herself felt the sting and hurt of such whisperings?

But then a childhood friend returns to F -. Elena is a successful author whose book, The Whispers Inside: A Reawakening of the Soul, has earned her a certain celebrity. In search of a new subject, she takes an interest in the story of Ilsbeth Clark and announces her intention to write a book about the long-dead woman, focusing on the natural magic she believes she possessed.

And Elena has everything Catherine has not, like a platform and connections and no one seems to care that Elena’s book will be pure speculation, tainting Ilsbeth’s memory rather than preserving it. Catherine is determined that something must be done and plots to blunt her rival’s pen. However she had not allowed for the fact that the past might not be so dead after all – that something is reaching out from the well, disturbing her reality.

Before summer’s over, one woman will be dead, the other accused of murder . . . but is she really guilty, or are there other forces at work? And who was Ilsbeth Clark, really? An innocent? A witch? Or something else entirely?

Format: eARC (304 pages)                        Publisher: Bantam Press
Publication date: 23rd February 2023 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Mystery, Fantasy

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Bookshop.org
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Hive | Amazon UK
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My Review

The publisher describes The Witch in the Well as ‘a deliciously disturbing Gothic tale of a revenge reaching out across the years’. There are elements that match that description, notably the sections entitled ‘The Nicksby Documents’ which have a really fantastical, malevolent and creepy feel.  Unfortunately I found the modern day storyline less diverting. It essentially depicts the increasingly fractious relationship between two women, Catherine and Elena, who were once childhood playmates but are now involved in a rivalry about who has the right to tell Ilsbeth Clark’s story.

Neither of the women are particularly likeable. Elena is a prolific poster on social media, a fan of hashtags and an advocate of listening to the voice of one’s SOUL (her capital letters, not mine).  For her, the ancient well is not a place of menace but somewhere magical, hence it being her favourite place for her morning yoga workout. She believes she has formed a spiritual connection with Ilsbeth and is possessed by the idea that she can use this to prove the existence of ‘good magic’. Unfortunately, the situation is rather different, creepily different in fact.

On the other hand, Catherine sees Ilsbeth as a victim of prejudice, like so many other women through history, and is intent on bringing this injustice to light.  Catherine can’t stop herself posting instalments from an open letter to the inhabitants of F- in response to their accusations against her. She feels she’s the victim of a modern day ‘witch hunt’.  Unsurprisingly, comments such as ‘In my humble experience, none of you are geniuses’ don’t endear her to the local people. And her unfiltered posts which include conversations with her family and her lawyer, Louise don’t go down well either. Responding to Catherine’s protestation that she felt she had to write it all down, Louise says, ‘Then keep a journal, for God’s sake! You don’t have to paste it all over the internet!’. Quite.

A combination of folk tale, horror story and mystery, the book incorporates a number of narrative structures, including Elena’s journal, Catherine’s Facebook posts, emails,  excerpts from Catherine’s novel about Ilsbeth Clark and the aforementioned ‘Nicksby Documents’ written by an unnamed author but whose identity it’s not too difficult to guess . The latter was probably the most successful bit of the book for me but overall the story felt rather disjointed and moved a bit too slowly.

I received a review copy courtesy of Bantam Press via NetGalley.

Camilla BruceAbout the Author

Camilla Bruce was born in central Norway and grew up in an old forest, next to an Iron Age burial mound. She has a master’s degree in comparative literature, and have co-run a small press that published dark fairy tales. Camilla currently lives in Trondheim with her son and cat. (Photo: Twitter profile)

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