Tag: NetGalley

#BookReview How To Belong by Sarah Franklin @ZaffreBooks

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How To BelongAbout the Book

Jo grew up in the Forest of Dean, but she was always the one destined to leave for a bigger, brighter future. When her parents retire from their butcher’s shop, she returns to her beloved community to save the family legacy, hoping also to save herself. But things are more complex than the rose-tinted version of life which sustained Jo from afar.

Tessa is a farrier, shoeing horses two miles and half a generation away from Jo, further into the Forest. Tessa’s experience of the community couldn’t be more different. Now she too has returned, in flight from a life she could have led, nursing a secret and a past filled with guilt and shame.

Compelled through circumstance to live together, these two women will be forced to confront their sense of identity, and reconsider the meaning of home.

Format: Hardcover (368 pages)               Publisher: Zaffre
Publication date: 12th November 2020 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Find How to Belong on Goodreads

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

My Review

I was initially drawn to Sarah Franklin’s first novel, Shelter, because it was set during World War Two which is one of my favourite periods for historical fiction. I was also intrigued by the choice of location, the Forest of Dean. I loved the book and it left me keen to read whatever Sarah came up with next.

In How To Belong the location is once more the Forest of Dean but this time we’re very much in the present day. However, there is a sense of the timelessness of the Forest, even if much around it has changed and is still changing. Not only a source of recreation and employment, and a haven for wildlife, the Forest acts as a place for contemplation and reflection. As one character puts it, “The trees will restore the mess“.

The book switches between the points of view of Jo and Tessa, two women who are very different in terms of their life experience and character. Tessa is by nature an introvert whose one attempt at reaching out and expressing her true self ended in rejection, disappointment and a sense of failure, for reasons the reader will gradually discover. Jo, on the other hand, has forged a life for herself away from the Forest, a life that had been successful in many ways but which has left her unfulfilled and with a desire to return to her roots.

Jo returns with big plans for the family butcher’s shop but is disappointed to find it more difficult than she expects to be absorbed back into the community. The friends she grew up with have built their own lives – married, started families – and talk about people she doesn’t know. “The group’s shifted. She doesn’t know who she is or where she fits in. There’s nowhere left for her to go.” In particular, Jo struggles to understand the change in her relationship with her childhood friend, Liam, with whom she was once so close. “She’s homesick for happy Liam, who doesn’t exist anymore; perhaps never did outside her own naive bubble… Most of all, she’s homesick for her old self.” What Jo comes to realise is that it’s possible to be the repository of others’ hopes and dreams, not just your own.

Tessa has become used to living a life socially distant from others. From childhood, she’s instinctively felt different from her peers for reasons she couldn’t initially explain. Traumatic incidents in her past have left her with a misplaced sense of guilt as well as worries about her future.

Thrown together by chance, Jo and Tessa slowly discover they have more in common than they may have thought and that each can help the other find a way to achieve the sense of belonging they both crave. Whether that’s feeling a part of a community or a family, having a sense of security, fulfilling a dream or simply being comfortable in your own skin.

How To Belong is an engrossing human drama that shows it’s never too late to start again, if you just give yourself the chance.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Zaffre Books, NetGalley and Readers First.

In three words: Tender, insightful, intimate

Try something similar: Birdie & Jude by Phyllis H. Moore

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Sarah FranklinAbout the Author

Sarah Franklin grew up in rural Gloucestershire and has lived in Austria, Germany, the USA and Ireland. She lectures in publishing at Oxford Brookes University and has written for the Guardian, the Irish Times, Psychologies magazine and The Pool. (Photo credit: Twitter profile)

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#BookReview When I Come Home Again by Caroline Scott @simonschusterUK

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When I Come Home Again BT Poster

Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for When I Come Home Again by Caroline Scott. My thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part and to Simon & Schuster for my digital review copy via NetGalley. Do also check out the post by my tour buddy for today, Joules at Northern Reader.

When I Come Home Again - Graphic 3About the Book

How can you know who you are, when you choose to forget who you’ve been?

November 1918. On the cusp of the end of the First World War, a uniformed soldier is arrested in Durham Cathedral. It quickly becomes clear that he has no memory of who he is or how he came to be there. The soldier is given the name Adam and transferred to a rehabilitation home where his doctor, James, tries everything he can to help Adam remember who he once was. There’s just one problem. Adam doesn’t want to remember.

Unwilling to relive the trauma of war, Adam has locked his mind away, seemingly for good. But when a newspaper publishes Adam’s photograph, three women come forward, each just as certain that Adam is their relative and that he should go home with them.

But does Adam really belong with any of these women? Or is there another family waiting for him to come home?

Based on true events, When I Come Home Again is a deeply moving and powerful story of a nation’s outpouring of grief, and the search for hope in the aftermath of the First World War.

Format: Hardcover (496 pages)           Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: 29th October 2020 Genre: Historical Fiction, Romance

Find When I Come Home Again on Goodreads

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

My Review

I loved Caroline Scott’s book, The Photographer of the Lost, so I was prepared for an emotional story and beautiful writing in this, her second book; I wasn’t disappointed. Once again the focus is the period after the First World War and the long-lasting effect of the conflict on the lives of so many.

Appropriately, as we approach Remembrance Sunday, the opening scenes of the book depict the journey of the coffin containing the body of the Unknown Warrior prior to its interment in Westminster Abbey. For some, the possibility the body may be that of a lost loved one brings solace, pride even. But for others, including the three women featured in the book, it does nothing but add to their fierce conviction that their missing brother, son or husband is not the body in the coffin, is not dead and will return some day. Often this in the face of advice from others to accept their loved one is gone and move on with their lives.

I loved how photographs play a part in the story, providing a link to the author’s first book. There’s the photograph published in the newspaper of the man given the name Adam Galilee that raises such fervent hope in those who have lost loved ones. And there are the photographs cherished by those families – of brothers, sons, husband who went to war and never came back – produced as evidence that Adam belongs with them. Or the photographs of parents, places or children placed in Adam’s hands in the hope of provoking a response, a flicker of recognition or a glimpse of his life before.

The scenes in which the three women who believe that Adam is their husband, son or brother come face to face with him for the first time are full of emotion and anguish. Their certainty, even though they cannot all be right, is heart-breaking to witness. But the author also conveys the emotional impact these encounters have on Adam himself, knowing the disappointment it will bring if they evoke no memories for him. Equally, the reader witnesses the effect on James Haworth, the doctor in charge of Fellside House, whose dogged determination to uncover Adam’s true identity threatens his own peace of mind.

The theme of memory runs through the book. Whether that’s the memories – good and bad – evoked by a particular place, the “muscle memory” of throwing a pot on a wheel or playing a piece by Chopin on the piano, the memory of a face but without the ability to put a name to it, or the act of remembrance in general. As long as someone is remembered, are they ever really lost? The book also poses the question whether memory can always be relied upon or, in wanting something so much to be true, it can become distorted. “Grief and hope are powerful emotions. What we see is sometimes what we want to see.”

When I Come Home Again is a beautifully crafted, emotional story that is also a timely reminder of the damaged minds and bodies that are the legacy of war.

In three words: Tender, insightful, emotional

Try something similar: The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

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thumbnail_Caroline Scott author photo - credit Johnny RingAbout the Author

Caroline completed a PhD in History at the University of Durham. She has a particular interest in the experience of women during the First World War, in the challenges faced by the returning soldier, and in the development of tourism and pilgrimage in the former conflict zones. Caroline is originally from Lancashire, but now lives in south-west France.

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