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The first couple of chapters introduce a lot of different people, which feels a bit bewildering at first. But the characterisation is good, and it wasn’t long before I could keep the main characters in my mind fairly easily. Jill is the first person to be mentioned. She and her family live on the Isle of Wight, where her husband Ash runs a medical centre. Jill is a psychologist and works at the centre, but she’s concerned about Ash. He seems worried, although it may just be that their firstborn, Rose, has just started university.
Then we meet Nick, who has evidently suffered a terrible bereavement. He dreams often of his late wife, and has some nightmares, too. He lives a mile or so away from Jill and Ash, in a rental cottage where he’s living a minimalist lifestyle and trying to decide what to do with his life. In the meantime, he’s taken on the huge project of trying to renovate a hotel and its grounds: this belongs to Jane, who was the main protagonist in ‘The sorrow of sisters’.
And there’s Sophie, who lives in London with her husband Peter. She is evidently someone who takes on a lot of responsibility caring for others. She has an elderly mother whom she visits regularly, and she works as a counsellor for a bereavement group. She’s looking forward to seeing Jill, who is her closest friend, and who will soon be visiting, while Peter is away.
Two traumatic things happen to Sophie, and she decides to take up a long-standing invitation to visit Jill and her family, for an unspecified period. It’s the catalyst for a lot of change in her life; Sophie has to decide who she really is, and what she wants to do. But she needs breathing space, so she’s very pleased when she’s offered a job as a waitress in a local cafe.
It’s a beautifully written book, with the lives of these folk - and others - gently weaving together. It’s a small community, so everyone knows everyone else. Rumours abound, though some are unfounded. I was pleased to read a bit more about Jane and her husband Chas, who features in ‘The sorrow of sisters’, and it was also good to see a bit more of Marguerite, an intriguing character who also has a major role in the first book. Marguerite is unable to speak, but communicates well with her own form of sign language. She’s also highly intuitive, and apparently psychic.
There are forays into various kinds of alternative medicine in this book, some of it harmless and possibly helpful. But one of the big problems stressing Jill is that Ash is dabbling in a form of regression therapy, something which really needs special training and careful supervision.
The importance of honesty in relationships is mentioned more than once, as well as the necessity of healing from traumas, and grieving for as long as it takes. And I was quite struck by conversations about childhood: one character, with quite a rigid upbringing, envied another character her free-and-easy bohemian mother. But the latter character longed, as a child, for a home that had rules and expectations. The message comes through: no childhood is perfect, and as adults we need to accept our past, forgive where possible, and take responsibility for our own decisions.
There are quite a few other issues that come to light in this book, which drew me in so much that I finished it in just two days. But the time I’d read about three chapters, I was hooked and could barely put the book down. The writing is evocative and the people all believable, with plenty of flaws. We see multiple viewpoints throughout the book, making it feel slightly less personal than a single-viewpoint novel; but it works well.
Definitely recommended if you like character-based novels with depth. The writing is evocative; the author evidently familiar with the Isle of Wight. It’s not necessary to have read ‘The sorrow of sisters’ first, but I think it helps to be familiar with at least a few of the people in the book.
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