Tag: NetGalley

Book Review: The Burning Chambers by Kate Mosse

whatcathyreadnext5 Comments

The Burning ChambersAbout the Book

Carcassonne 1562: Nineteen-year-old Minou Joubert receives an anonymous letter at her father’s bookshop. Sealed with a distinctive family crest, it contains just five words: SHE KNOWS THAT YOU LIVE.

But before Minou can decipher the mysterious message, a chance encounter with a young Huguenot convert, Piet Reydon, changes her destiny forever. For Piet has a dangerous mission of his own, and he will need Minou’s help if he is to get out of La Cité alive.

Toulouse: As the religious divide deepens in the Midi, and old friends become enemies, Minou and Piet both find themselves trapped in Toulouse, facing new dangers as sectarian tensions ignite across the city, the battle-lines are drawn in blood and the conspiracy darkens further.

Meanwhile, as a long-hidden document threatens to resurface, the mistress of Puivert is obsessed with uncovering its secret and strengthening her power . . .

Format: ebook, hardcover (608 pp.)    Publisher: Mantle Books
Published: 3rd May 2018                        Genre: Historical Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Burning Chambers on Goodreads

My Review

CarcassonneI absolutely loved Kate Mosse’s Languedoc trilogy (Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel) and the atmospheric The Winter Ghosts.  The author returns to the setting of previous novels – Carcassonne – but this time without the dual time structure of Labyrinth and Sepulchre. Instead the reader is plunged into the sights and sounds of 16th century France, a time of religious strife between the Catholic Church and Protestant Huguenots.  ‘The threat of being denounced terrified everyone; a man could be strung up for uttering the wrong prayer, kneeling at the wrong altar.’  However, as one character observes, “A war of faith is always about more than faith.”  In this case, for some, it’s about power and influence.

The Burning Chambers contains all the elements a reader has come to love and expect from a Kate Mosse novel: strong female characters, secrets passed down through generations, an inheritance, a forgery, a Will, a labyrinthine but totally absorbing plot.  There is love, passion and betrayal.  There is murder, treachery and brutal interrogation.  And, when it comes down to it, who can be trusted, even amongst those you believe your closest friends?

The story lines involving Minou and Piet are interspersed with extracts from the testimony of an unnamed woman who reveals herself as something of a Lady Macbeth character, prepared to stop at nothing to achieve her aims.   Eventually, the various story lines and leading characters converge on the place that holds the key to one element of the mystery before building to a dramatic climax. However, ‘old crimes cast long shadows…’ so this is a feud that could continue down the generations.

If you gave Mary Berry flour, butter, eggs and sugar, you could be absolutely sure she’d create the perfect Victoria sponge cake.  In the same way, in The Burning Chambers, Kate Mosse expertly combines all the ingredients necessary for a deliciously satisfying historical fiction novel…with the Prologue providing the promise of further appetising slices still to come.

I received a review copy courtesy of publishers, Mantle Books, and NetGalley in return for an honest and unbiased review.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

In three words: Intense, sweeping, entertaining

Try something similar…Sacrilege by S. J Parris

Kate MosseAbout the Author

Kate Mosse is an international bestselling author with sales of more than five million copies in 42 languages. Her fiction includes the novels Labyrinth (2005), Sepulchre (2007), The Winter Ghosts (2009), and Citadel (2012), as well as an acclaimed collection of short stories, The Mistletoe Bride & Other Haunting Tales (2013). Kate’s new novel, The Taxidermist’s Daughter is out now.

Kate is the Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (previously the Orange Prize) and in June 2013, was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to literature. She lives in Sussex.

Connect with Kate

Website  ǀ  Facebook  ǀ  Twitter  ǀ  Instagram ǀ Goodreads

Book Review: The Illumination of Ursula Flight by Anna-Marie Crowhurst

whatcathyreadnext10 Comments

The Illumination of Ursula FlightAbout the Book

Born on the night of an ill-auguring comet just before Charles II’s Restoration, Ursula Flight has a difficult future written in the stars.

Against the custom of the age she begins an education with her father, who fosters in her a love of reading, writing and astrology.

Following a surprise meeting with an actress, Ursula yearns for the theatre and thus begins her quest to become a playwright despite scoundrels, bounders, bad luck and heartbreak.

Format: ebook, hardcover (416 pp.)    Publisher: Allen and Unwin UK
Published: 3rd May 2018                        Genre: Historical Fiction

Pre-order/Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Illumination of Ursula Flight on Goodreads

My Review

Ursula gives us the story of her life in her own inimitable fashion starting with her birth as a comet crosses the sky and her childhood encounter with an actress that sparks her interest in the theatre.  Having an unusually enlightened father, Ursula learns Latin, Greek and other languages, studies astronomy and reads every book and play she can lay her hands on.  Soon she’s trying her own hand at writing plays, depicting scenes of love, comedy, mischief and a little wishful thinking that are acted out with her young friends.

Unfortunately for Ursula, all the fun and games come to an end when she is promised in marriage to Lord Tyringham.  As well as being an unfortunate match, Ursula misses her friends and family and finds herself bored with the responsibilities of being a wife.  Things come to a head when Ursula discovers secrets about her husband that the alert reader may have suspected for some time.

Although I found the whole book entertaining, I’ll admit it really picked up for me in the last third when the location changes and Ursula finally gets a chance to take her future into her own hands.  Unfortunately, this is not before she has learned through bitter experience that men are not always to be trusted!

The story is told in the distinctive voice the author has created for Ursula and interspersed with excerpts from Ursula’s plays, diary entries and personal notes that reveal her innermost thoughts.   I really enjoyed the humour in the plays and some of her lists are extremely funny.  For example, her ‘Discourse on Matrimony & Wiving for New Brides’ by  ‘A Married Woman Who Knoweth’ in which the most useful piece of advice is probably: ‘If all other courses fail you, and you are brought down by worries or woe or other encumbrances suffered by the dutiful wife and feel fit to burst with ill feeling and frustration and love-lack, steal yourself out of doors away from prying eyes and running as fast as and as furious as you can, scream every oath you know in English, and other languages.’  Yep, I reckon that still works.   There’s also the particularly saucy list she comes up with later in the book.  (Those who have read the book will immediately recognise the bit I’m talking about.)  The quirky chapter headings (such as ‘In which we dine en famille and I am perturbed’) also give a sense of the period in which the book is set.

The Illumination of Ursula Flight is great fun and deserves all the curtain calls and cries of ‘Author, Author’ it will no doubt receive.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of publishers, Allen and Unwin, and NetGalley in return for an honest and unbiased review.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

In three words: Lively, inventive, funny

Try something similar…The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar (click here to read my review)

Anna-Marie CrowhurstAbout the Author

Anna-Marie Crowhurst has worked as a freelance journalist and columnist for more than 15 years, contributing to The Times, The Guardian, Time Out, Newsweek, Emerald Street and Stylist. In 2016 she studied for an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, where her debut novel The Illumination of Ursula Flight was born. She lives in London.

Connect with Anna-Marie

Website  ǀ  Twitter ǀ  Instagram ǀ Goodreads