Tag: historical fiction

#BlogTour #BookReview The House at Helygen by Victoria Hawthorne

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The House at Helygen Blog Tour PosterWelcome to the final day of the blog tour for The House at Helygen by Victoria Hawthorne. My thanks to Katya at Quercus for inviting me to take part and for my review copy. You can read my thoughts on the book, which was published on 18th August, below.

The House at HelygenAbout the Book

2019. When Henry Fox is found dead in his ancestral home in Cornwall, the police rule it a suicide, but his pregnant wife, Josie, believes it was murder. Desperate to make sense of Henry’s death she embarks on a quest to learn the truth, all under the watchful eyes of Henry’s overbearing mother. Josie soon finds herself wrestling against the dark history of Helygen House and ghosts from the past that refuse to stay buried.

1881. New bride Eliza arrives at Helygen House with high hopes for her marriage. Yet when she meets her new mother-in-law, an icy and forbidding woman, her dreams of a new life are dashed. And when Eliza starts to hear voices in the walls of the house, she begins to fear for her sanity and her life.

Can Josie piece together the past to make sense of her present, or will the secrets of Helygen House and its inhabitants forever remain a mystery?

Format: Paperback (368 pages)        Publisher: Quercus
Publication date: 18th August 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction, Dual Time

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My Review

Moving between past and present, The House at Helygen starts off mysterious, progresses to sinister and concludes as full-on melodrama.  If you’re looking for a book with the vibes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, you’re in the right place. The present day Helygen House even has a west wing previously destroyed by fire. And if you were looking for a modern day equivalent of Rebecca‘s Mrs Danvers then look no further than Josie’s mother-in-law, Alice, who in her habits and attitudes seems a woman ‘from another time entirely… who doesn’t live in the modern world at all’, closely followed by Eliza’s mother-in-law, Harriet, in the 19th century story.

Told from the point of view of two women, separated by over a century but who share many of the same experiences, plus the voice of a third woman through means of a journal, that narrative device beloved of historical novelists, The House at Helygen contains everything you might want from a historical suspense novel.

The author creates a brooding sense of menace which gradually builds as the house reveals it secrets and the dark past of the families who have occupied it. A silhouette glimpsed in a doorway, an unexplained cry in the night, a shadowy figure under a willow tree (very The Turn of the Screw), something scratching against a window ‘like fingers clawing to get in’.  And then there’s the disquieting atmosphere of some of the unused rooms of Helygen House where past and present seem separated by a mere whisper. Josie’s friend, Flick, sums it up well. ‘It just feels weird in here. Like something isn’t quite right. Like the air has been disturbed, and we’re trespassing. Like we shouldn’t be in here at all.’

The House at Helygen is a skilfully crafted story of obsession, secrets and what might be a grim inheritance.

In three words: Atmospheric, suspenseful, intricate

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Victoria HawthorneAbout the Author

Vikki Patis is the bestselling author of psychological thrillers In the Dark (2021), The Wake (2020), Girl, Lost (2020), The Girl Across the Street (2019), and The Diary (2018). Girl, Lost, a top 100 bestseller on Amazon, was later longlisted for the Not the Booker Prize 2020. Her latest thriller, Return to Blackwater House, was published in March 2022 by Hodder & Stoughton.

She is represented by Emily Glenister at DHH Literary Agency and also writes historical fiction as Victoria Hawthorne. Her first historical suspense novel, The House at Helygen, was published in April 2022 by Quercus, with another to follow in 2023.

Vikki has also written articles for numerous publications. After being diagnosed with Perthes disease as a child, fibromyalgia in 2016 and coeliac disease in 2018, she tries to raise awareness of living with a chronic illness through her writing, and includes a diverse range of characters in her fiction. She lives in Scotland with her wife, two wild golden retrievers, and an even wilder cat.

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#BookReview The Women of the Castle by Jessica Shattuck

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The Women of the CastleAbout the Book

Bavaria, Germany. June 1945. The Third Reich has crumbled. The Russians are coming.

Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband’s ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed 20th July 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows.

Marianne assembles a makeshift family from the ruins of her husband’s resistance movement, rescuing her dearest friend’s widow, Benita, from sex slavery to the Russian army, and Ania from a work camp for political prisoners. She is certain their shared past will bind them together.

But as Benita begins a clandestine relationship and Ania struggles to conceal her role in the Nazi regime, Marianne learns that her clear-cut, highly principled world view is infinitely more complicated now, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart.

All three women must grapple with the realities they now face, and the consequences of decisions each made in the darkest of times…

Format: Hardback (368 pages)     Publisher: Zaffre
Publication date: 18th May 2017 Genre: Historical Fiction

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Hive | Amazon UK
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20-books-of-summerMy Review

The Women of the Castle is the third book from my list for the 20 Books of Summer 2022 reading challenge. Yes I know, we’re already over half way through August. Like all the other books on my list, it’s been in my TBR pile for way too long.

Firstly the things I liked about the book. I thought the way the author uses the prologue to contrast the glamorous atmosphere within the castle with events elsewhere in Germany was very powerful. ‘But outside, beyond the walls, terrible things were happening.’ Even more so once we realise the party is taking place on what will come to be known as Kristallnacht. I also liked the fact the book focuses on Germans who were opposed to the Nazi regime, including those such as Marianne’s husband who made the difficult choice to take direct action to oppose Hitler. I found the stories of Ania and Benita especially powerful (even if I never quite worked out how Ania ended up on Marianne’s list of the wives of resisters).

As the book progressed I didn’t mind the changes in point of view from one woman to another but the frequent moving back and forth in time left me frustrated and often confused.  At one point the book jumps back to 1923 and a rather unnecessary (to my mind) final part sees us in 1991. Often there are brief references to quite significant events in the past but it is many chapters before we learn the full details of them.  At times, I felt the book glossed over some events while dealing with others in painstaking detail.

Marianne is the dominant character in the book, or perhaps domineering would be more appropriate. So many of the events in the lives of the other two women are influenced by the decisions Marianne makes. On a number of occasions they are wrong, even fateful decisions. As Benita observes at one point, ‘It was so much like Marianne to act first and then think.’ I had to agree with Ania’s first impression of Marianne as a woman ‘accustomed to giving orders.’ Although I could admire Marianne’s determination to fulfil the promise made to her husband to be ‘the commander of wives and children’ and rescue the families of his co-conspirators, I found her rather contradictory. For example, she is effortlessly multi-lingual but can’t acquite basic cookery skills.

Focussing on the positives once again, I felt the book was particularly successful in demonstrating how difficult it can be to lay to rest the events of the past, to heal the divisions caused by war, and to repair, both physically and mentally, the damage that has been done. Benita exemplifies this well. ‘History was horrible, a long, sloppy tail of grief. It swished destructively behind the present, toppling everyone’s own personal understanding of the past.’

In the Acknowledgments, Jessica Shattuck reveals that it took her seven years to write this book, much of it inspired by her own family history. The depth of historical detail in the book is evidence of her painstaking research. However, although I found much to admire about The Women in the Castle, the back and forth structure of the book didn’t quite work for me.

I received a review copy courtesy of Zaffre.

In three words: Powerful, detailed, expansive

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Jessica ShattuckAbout the Author

Jessica Shattuck is the award-winning author of The Hazards of Good Breeding, a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award, and of Perfect Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones, Wired, and The Believer, among others. A graduate of Harvard University, she received her MFA from Columbia University. Shattuck now lives with her husband and three children in Brookline, MA.

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