Six Degrees of Separation: From The Post Office Girl to The Tiger’s Wife

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It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we’re starting with The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig. I haven’t read it, but here’s what it’s about:

It’s the 1930s. Christine, A young Austrian woman whose family has been impoverished by the war, toils away in a provincial post office. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from an American aunt she’s never known, inviting her to spend two weeks in a Grand Hotel in a fashionable Swiss resort. She accepts and is swept up into a world of almost inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire, where she allows herself to be utterly transformed. Then, just as abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose and she has to return to the post office, where – yes – nothing will ever be the same.

My first link is a very obvious one, inspired by the mention of post offices – I’ve chosen The Postmistress by Sarah Blake (1). It tells the story of a postmistress (or postmaster as she prefers to call herself) in a small town in Massachusetts during World War II. Although I found this book a bit disappointing and couldn’t connect with the characters, I did enjoy the insights into how the war was affecting the lives of American people in the period just before the US officially joined the conflict.

Another book that explores life in America during the war is Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s 1947 novel, The Blank Wall (2). I really enjoyed this one! It follows Lucia Holley, who is left at home with her teenage children while her husband is serving in the Navy and finds herself covering up a series of crimes in an attempt to avoid a family scandal. I loved the way Holding blends the details of Lucia’s domestic life with elements of suspense and danger.

The name Lucia appears in the title of the first book in EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series, Queen Lucia (3). First published in 1920, this is a humorous novel about a small community presided over by Emmeline Lucas, who really does regard herself as queen of the village! This book wasn’t entirely to my taste and I haven’t continued with the next one yet, but I read it at the start of the Covid pandemic and it was just the sort of light read I needed to take my mind off things.

The word Mapp made me think of maps and mapmakers. In The Bird King by G Willow Wilson (4), a mapmaker in Granada’s Alhambra palace is accused of sorcery when it’s discovered that he has the ability to draw magical maps of places he has never visited. He and his friend, Fatima, flee across 15th century Spain in search of the legendary island of Qaf, said to be the home of the King of the Birds. This is an unusual novel, combining history, myth and fantasy.

Court of Lions by Jane Johnson (5) is also set, at least partly, in the Alhambra. This is a dual timeline novel. Although I found the modern day storyline too melodramatic and some of the threads linking the two periods were unconvincing, the historical storyline is fascinating, covering the life of Sultan Abu Abdullah Muhammad (known as Boabdil) and the fall of Granada in 1492.

From lions to tigers for my final link! The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (6), which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction (then known as the Orange Prize) in 2011, is set in an unnamed Balkan country and follows a young woman who decides to investigate the circumstances surrounding her grandfather’s death and discovers a link with an old folk tale involving an escaped tiger. I remember finding it interesting but I still haven’t read any of her other books.

And that’s my chain for June. My links have included: post offices, America in WWII, the name Lucia, maps (or Mapps), the Alhambra and big cats!

In July we’ll be starting with Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke.

Son of Nobody by Yann Martel

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Homer’s Iliad, the most famous account of the Trojan War, focuses on gods, heroes and great warriors – but what if there was another version, written from the perspective of the ordinary people, the ‘sons of nobody’? Yann Martel explores this idea in his new novel, the first I’ve read since Life of Pi, which I loved. I enjoyed this one as well; it’s an unusual and ambitious book, but it worked for me.

The novel is narrated by Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic whose area of interest is Greek epics. When he receives an offer to take part in a research project at Oxford University, he sees it as the opportunity of a lifetime and leaves his wife and daughter behind in Canada to travel to England alone and take up his new position. At Oxford, Harlow begins to study the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a collection of ancient manuscripts, and comes across some fragments of what appears to be the story of a man called Psoas of Midea and an alternative account of the events of the Iliad. Psoas is not a god, a king or a hero – he’s a goatherd, a commoner, referred to in the fragments as the son of nobody. As Harlow continues to piece together and translate the fragments, a whole new epic begins to emerge, which he thinks of as the Psoad, and at the same time he becomes aware of parallels with his own life.

Each chapter of the novel begins with a section of the Psoad, which is written in verse, and is followed by Harlow’s footnotes in which he interprets what is being said and what we can learn from it. Sometimes, though, his footnotes go in a different direction and he talks about his personal life, his work at Magdalen College and his relationships with his wife, Gail, and their young daughter, Helen. Harlow sees himself as Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, who sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods in return for winds and then sailed off to the Trojan War for ten years, leaving his wife, Clytemnestra, behind. Like Agamemnon, Harlow has abandoned his own wife and child to go in pursuit of his own ‘Troy’, in other words his translation of the new Greek epic.

I wasn’t sure at first how I would feel about reading an imitation epic, but I think Martel does a great job of making it feel reasonably authentic, as if it could have existed even though we know it didn’t. The Psoad differs from the Iliad in many ways – for example, instead of the famous Trojan Horse there are elephants – and Harlow draws comparisons between the two in his footnotes (which I believe in the physical book version are printed across the bottom half of the page, separated by a line from the verse fragments in the top half, although you couldn’t see this formatting in the NetGalley version I read). I think you could still follow and enjoy the book with no prior knowledge of the Iliad or the Trojan War, but having at least some familiarity will help you to get more out of it.

Harlow’s personal story is also interesting as a portrayal of a man who becomes so obsessed with his work that he completely neglects his wife and daughter. I had a lot of sympathy for Gail, who can’t understand why her husband is putting a fictional story ahead of his family’s real needs and concerns. I liked Harlow less and less as the book went on, but was still moved by the traumatic events that happen in his life towards the end.

I’m sure Son of Nobody won’t be for everyone, but if it sounds at all appealing to you I would recommend giving it a try. I found it very impressive and completely different from the usual Greek retellings.

Thanks to Canongate Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Last Love Song by Lucinda Riley

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This is a reworking of one of Lucinda Riley’s early novels, originally published as Losing You in 1997 under the name Lucinda Edmonds. After Riley’s death in 2021, her son Harry Whittaker completed her unfinished novel, Atlas, then updated another of her early books, Hidden Beauty, as The Hidden Girl. It would be interesting to know exactly how much is Whittaker’s work, but without reading the originals it’s impossible to tell.

The Last Love Song begins in 1964 in the village of Ballymore on the coast of West Cork, Ireland. When sixteen-year-old Sorcha O’Donovan goes to see a local band with her friends from school, she has no idea that her life is about to change forever. Within months she is heading for London with the lead singer, Con Daly, having been disowned by her father, who disapproves of their relationship. After a period of struggling to make ends meet while Con looks for opportunities in London’s vibrant music scene, he finally achieves stardom with his new band, The Fishermen, and he and Sorcha become rich and famous almost overnight. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily bring happiness and when Helen McCarthy, a face from both their pasts, arrives back in their lives, everything starts to go wrong.

Two decades later, preparations are being made for a huge charity concert at Wembley Stadium. The Fishermen have agreed to reform for the event, but one member is missing – Con Daly, who disappeared seventeen years ago after suffering a personal tragedy. There’s only one person who may be able to find out what happened all those years earlier; the problem is, she’s in prison…

I enjoyed this book; it was much more than just the simple romance it seemed to be at first. Although I found Sorcha slightly bland, I thought Helen McCarthy was a great character and I veered between loving and hating her at various times throughout the book. Mostly I admired her for trying to get what she wanted out of life despite things not always going her way. There’s also a crime element to the story, which becomes stronger towards the end – my biggest criticism of the book is that this part of the plot is dropped for a long section in the middle – and although I easily guessed who the culprit was, I was kept in suspense wondering when and how they would finally be caught!

What I really loved about this book, though, is the portrayal of the 60s music scene. The novel takes us step by step through every stage of the Fishermens’ rise to fame, beginning with the formation of the band and choosing of the name, their first meeting with the man who would become their manager, and the difficulties they faced in getting signed to a record label. The complex and often tense relationships between the four band members are explored and it’s difficult not to think of the Beatles, with Con and Todd in the Lennon-McCartney positions as the band’s two main songwriters, Derek as an aspiring songwriter in his own right, struggling to make himself heard, and Ian as the happy-go-lucky drummer. If you enjoyed Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, I think you’ll like the musical aspect of this novel, if nothing else!

I think there are one or two more Edmonds novels that haven’t been published yet, but I haven’t seen any news on whether Harry Whittaker will be reworking them as well. Of the books already available under the Riley name, I haven’t read Hothouse Flower or The Angel Tree yet, so still have those two to look forward to. I’ve also discovered that Harry has written his own book, Orlando, coming later this year.

Thanks to Pan Macmillan for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (re-read)

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I hadn’t been planning a re-read of this book, but when FictionFan announced a review-along I couldn’t resist joining in. I’m not sure exactly when I first read it, but it must have been around twenty years ago when I went through a phase of reading Victorian sensation novels (if you’re not familiar with the term, the sensation novel was a popular genre of 19th century fiction featuring shocking crimes in ordinary domestic settings). This is one that I particularly enjoyed so I was happy to read it again and am looking forward to reading the other review-along participants’ reviews to see what everyone else thought!

Lady Audley’s Secret was published in 1862 and was Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s most successful novel, although she wrote more than eighty others, as well as some short stories. The first thing I discovered when I started to re-read it is that I could barely remember anything at all about it, so it was almost like experiencing it for the first time again.

The novel opens with the marriage of Sir Michael Audley and Lucy Graham. Lucy is young and beautiful and Sir Michael, a middle-aged widower, is enchanted by his new wife. Little is known about her past before she arrived in the village as governess to the local doctor’s children, but Sir Michael doesn’t care – Lucy’s happiness is all that matters to him. Meanwhile, his nephew, Robert Audley, has just been reacquainted with his old friend George Talboys, who has been in Australia for three years. George, who had found himself struggling financially, had left his wife, Helen, in England while he went off to improve his fortunes. Now that he’s returned, he’s looking forward to seeing her again and is heartbroken when he discovers that she has died during his absence.

Robert does his best to comfort his friend and brings him to Audley Court to meet Sir Michael, hoping it will help to take his mind off things. However, when George disappears without explanation, Robert begins to grow suspicious of his uncle’s new wife. Convinced that George has been murdered and that the new Lady Audley is implicated, Robert begins to investigate her past and is shocked by what he discovers.

I won’t discuss the plot in any more detail as I don’t want to give too much away, but all the typical elements of a sensation novel are here: murder, arson, family secrets, stolen letters, faked telegrams, blackmail, hidden identities, thunderstorms and all sort of lies and deception! The book also touches on some more serious topics, such as the subject of madness, how it was viewed in the 19th century and how it was often used as a convenient excuse to have women locked away in order to avoid embarrassment or scandal. It’s not really difficult to guess some of the secrets but, remembering that this was one of the first and most influential books of its type, I expect readers at the time would have found it more shocking and unpredictable. It would also have had some extra relevance for Victorian readers, as Braddon took inspiration from the high profile Constance Kent murder case of 1860, which also inspired parts of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and, much later, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale.

One thing I had forgotten from my previous read was how little of the story is actually written from Lady Audley’s perspective. Instead, we spend most of the novel in Robert Audley’s company as he tries to get to the bottom of his friend’s disappearance. Although ‘detective fiction’ didn’t really exist in 1861 in the way we know it today, Robert, who is a lawyer, takes on the role of an amateur detective, tracing clues, gathering evidence and speaking to witnesses. It’s fascinating to watch him gradually begin to unravel the truth, although I didn’t always agree with what he did with the information he uncovered! Because most of what we see and learn of Lady Audley is from Robert’s point of view, she’s very much the villain of the book, but I think it’s clear that Braddon wants us to at least have some sympathy for her circumstances, if not her actions. I was a bit disappointed that George’s sister, Clara Talboys, doesn’t play a bigger part in the story, though – when she’s first introduced, it seems she’s going to join Robert in his investigations, but she barely appears again until the end.

I enjoyed my re-read, then; it’s a very readable book and although it’s quite a long one and the pace slows down at times, I still flew through the pages faster than you would expect. I’ve also read two other books by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, both of which I’ve reviewed on my blog: Aurora Floyd and The Doctor’s Wife. The first has quite a similar feel to Lady Audley’s Secret, although I didn’t find it as exciting, but the latter is very different. I’ll definitely try to explore more of Braddon’s books soon, but I would also like to revisit East Lynne by Ellen Wood and some of my favourite Wilkie Collins sensation novels.

Here are the reviews of the other review-along participants. Let me know if I’ve missed yours!

FictionFan’s Book Reviews

Rose Reads Novels

Novel Deelights

Kelly’s Thoughts and Ramblings

What? Me Read?

My Commonplace Book: May 2026

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A selection of quotes and pictures to represent May’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

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A certain freedom of action was required in any relationship, even if caring deeply for a person you love also brought a type of freedom in itself.

24 Hours in Shogun’s Japan by Mark Hudson (2026)

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Aren’t memories like cats, either impossible to put out, or resistant to all attempts to call them to you?

Murder at the Spirit Lounge by Jess Kidd (2026)

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As one Polish architect put it to me, “Daylight is free. If something is free, people kind of neglect the importance of it.”

The Inner Clock by Lynne Peeples (2024)

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Anne of Cleves, by Hans Holbein the Younger

‘I’d rather die,’ Bridget said. On occasion she could be as melodramatic as Rose. ‘I will only marry a man if he has a good library.’

The Fourth Queen by Nicola Cornick (2026)

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Don’t tell me that’s of no importance. You’d be mistaken. You’d be like those rich people who like to claim that money doesn’t matter. That’s because they have it, damn it! But what about when you don’t? Have you ever known what it’s like not to have any?

Letter to My Judge by Georges Simenon (1947)

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Yet now, seeing her vulnerable, human side, Yvette realised how easy it was to judge people by the armour they wore. She considered how often one didn’t know what people had gone through and what suffering they carried within them.

The Lost Orphans of Lyon by Helen Parusel (2026)

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Mila nodded her agreement. She thought how, in a way, summer days did last forever. It was only the people who changed; the younger generation constantly replacing the old.

The Sea Sisters by Louise Douglas (2026)

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Fragments of the second book of the Iliad from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri

Because war is still war, perhaps less artful, less effective, less heroic than the bards sing it, but still deadly, still widow-making and orphan-fathering, still tragic. On the canvas of the Trojan War, it is the depth of the colour that counts, not the exactitude of the lines.

Son of Nobody by Yann Martel (2026)

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I pass over the spectacle of Poirot on a camel. He started by groans and lamentations and ended by shrieks, gesticulations and invocations to the Virgin Mary and every Saint in the calendar. In the end, he descended ignominiously and finished the journey on a diminutive donkey. I must admit that a trotting camel is no joke for the amateur. I was stiff for several days.

Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie (1924)

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He forgot that love, which is a madness, and a scourge, and a fever, and a delusion, and a snare, is also a mystery, and very imperfectly understood by everyone except the individual sufferer who writhes under its tortures.

Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862)

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The solitude and his own company suited him and days like this, when everything was white and the trees were skeletal, didn’t bother him. It just made the Northumbrian countryside more stunning. Yet it also made you realise what a tiny part of the world you inhabited as a human being.

And that was the part that, if you dwelt on it too much, could freak you out.

The Witch’s Stone by Kirsty Ferry (2026)

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Favourite books read in May:

The Lost Orphans of Lyon and Lady Audley’s Secret

Authors read for the first time in May:

Mark Hudson, Helen Parusel, Lynne Peeples and Kirsty Ferry

Places visited in my May reading:

England, Japan, France, Egypt, USA, Canada

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Reading notes: May has been a good month of reading and I was particularly pleased to finish two nonfiction books, as reading more nonfiction was one of my resolutions for the year. Lady Audley’s Secret was a re-read for me (another of my resolutions was to do some re-reading!) and I’ll be reviewing it tomorrow for FictionFan’s review-along. Otherwise, my other outstanding reviews will appear eventually!

This year’s 20 Books of Summer challenge begins tomorrow. I posted my plans last week and although there are some books I’m definitely hoping to get to this summer, I’m also going to allow myself plenty of flexibility, particularly as I’ll be away for a week in June and a week in July. There are some other reading events taking place this summer as well, beginning with Mallika’s cat-themed Reading the Meow event, which runs from 15-21 June, and I have at least one book lined up for that.

Have you read any good books this month? What are you hoping to read in June?

The Eagle and the Hart by Helen Castor

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The Eagle and the Hart is a dual biography of two English kings, Richard II and Henry IV (also known as Bolingbroke). Cousins born just a few months apart, they were both grandsons of Edward III, so their lives were linked from the beginning, although their paths to the throne were very different. In this biography, which was longlisted for last year’s Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, historian Helen Castor explores the stories of the two kings, with the title of the book inspired by their heraldic emblems, Richard’s white hart and Henry’s golden eagle. The book moves forward chronologically, beginning with the childhoods of both kings then continuing through Richard’s reign and deposition by Henry, finally ending just after Henry’s death in 1413.

Richard II is shown very much as he usually is: a weak, unpopular king whose reign was marked by high taxation and accusations of favouritism, his only shining moment being his handling of the Peasants’ Revolt; a man who believed in his divine right to rule, who liked the status and power that came with being king but didn’t have the personal qualities needed to be a good leader. Castor doesn’t challenge any of these ideas and her sympathies are clearly more with Henry, portrayed as having all the abilities Richard lacks but the misfortune to be born to a younger son and not in the direct line of succession. However, when Henry eventually seizes his chance to become king, his own reign is also beset with problems and he spends his time dealing with various plots, assassination attempts and rebellions.

Although I’ve read historical fiction featuring Richard II and Henry IV and both have popped up in some general non-fiction I’ve read about the period (such as The Plantagenets by Dan Jones), this is the first time I’ve read a full biography of either of them. It wasn’t quite what I would have preferred, though. The book is described in the blurb as ‘the story of one of the strangest and most fateful relationships in English history’, so I would have liked more focus on this relationship, more direct comparison of their backgrounds and discussion of how this shaped their different political and leadership styles, some analysis of their meetings and interactions etc. In fairness, as Castor points out in her introduction, it’s difficult to draw a psychological portrait without access to diaries, private letters or memoirs. What we get, then, is a book that feels like two separate biographies unfolding in parallel, with little crossover between the two, and I found the writing style generally quite dry and impersonal.

The Eagle and the Hart is a long book and I took my time reading it as there’s so much information to take in. There’s also some additional material at the front of the book including maps, family trees, a list of illustrations and at the back, taking up the final 25% of the book, a bibliography, directory of the main players in the royal and noble families, notes and an index. I think for anyone wanting to make a serious study of the period, this book could be a very useful resource. For the general reader, there’s maybe a bit more detail than is really necessary, but it obviously depends on the type of book you prefer and are looking for. The other book I’ve read by Castor, She-Wolves, was more enjoyable but I did get a lot out of reading this one as well.

The Cromarty Library Circle by Shona MacLean

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My experience of Shona MacLean’s work has so far been limited to her historical thriller, The Bookseller of Inverness, set in Scotland in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rising (and published under the name SG MacLean). Her newest novel, The Cromarty Library Circle, is very different – the only similarity is that it’s also set in Scotland.

Cromarty is a town in the Scottish Highlands, situated at the tip of the Black Isle. The story takes place in 1831, when a group of people get together to form a circulating library and discuss which books they should order for it. They’re a select group, referred to by the town clockmaker (who has not been invited, despite being better read than they are) as ‘the great and the good’. They include Sir William and Charlotte Mackenzie, the local laird and his wife; her best friend, Rachel who is married to the minister, Alasdair Mackay; the previous minister, Micah Fraser, now retired; the hotel keeper Mrs Cameron and her son Ludovic, who works in a bank; two spinster sisters, the Misses Rose; a newly arrived schoolteacher, John Learmonth; an antiquarian, Isaac Fordyce, and the owner of a rope factory, Willie Hossack.

If you feel overwhelmed by this list, I can tell you that there are even more characters – those outside of the library circle – who also play a part in the story. Maybe it would have been better if I’d read this book in physical form and could easily turn back to the character list at the beginning, but I read it on my Kindle and struggled to keep track of who was who. It didn’t help that we switch from one perspective to another every few pages, rather than being given time to get to know one character before meeting another. Once I eventually managed to settle into the book and keep the many residents of Cromarty straight in my head, though, I found a lot to interest me.

In terms of plot, not much actually happens in the first half of the book. MacLean takes her time setting the scene and introducing the characters, focusing on all the gossip, snobbery, rivalries and minor scandals that go along with being part of a small 19th century community with a clearly defined social structure. I was strongly reminded of Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. The drama is saved for later in the book, when the troubled marriage between Sir William and Charlotte Mackenzie reaches breaking point, the secret past of schoolmaster John Learmonth is revealed, and the people of Cromarty have finally had enough of the arrogant, bullying attitude of the ropemaker’s son, Farquhar Hossack. I was more invested in the story by this point, so I think, for me, it was worth persevering through the slow, confusing beginning.

The lives of the characters play out against the backdrop of wider political and social changes affecting Scotland and the world as a whole. One of these issues is the debate around the abolition of slavery; this is of particular significance to our story because Sir William owns a plantation in the Caribbean and another character, Hester, is a formerly enslaved woman from Demerara who now works as a servant at the Camerons’ hotel. There’s also a lot of discussion in Cromarty of the Reform Act about to be passed in parliament which will extend the right to vote (although still not to women or most working class men). Then there’s the cholera epidemic gradually moving closer and closer to Cromarty and we even hear about the recent Polish uprising against Russia through the character of Stanislas, the clockmaker’s apprentice. The novel touches on so many different things that I felt the library circle storyline got a bit lost in the background, although it serves its purpose of bringing the central group of characters together now and then.

I had a mixture of feelings about this book, then, but in the end I enjoyed getting to know the people of Cromarty. I’ll look out for Shona MacLean’s next book, but I still have one of her earlier ones, The Redemption of Alexander Seaton, waiting to be read.

Thanks to Quercus Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.