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THE GLASS HOUSE by Eve Chase (Michael Joseph £14.99, 400 pp)
THE GLASS HOUSE
by Eve Chase (Michael Joseph £14.99, 400 pp)
Eve Chase’s novels are about glamorous families with tragic pasts, set in wonderful locations. Her writing is rich and her stories full of dreamy mystery. In this latest, which moves between the 1970s and the present day, the glamorous family is the Harringtons and the tragedy is beautiful Jeannie Harrington’s lost baby.
In its aftermath, the family moves from Primrose Hill to the ancestral Foxcote Manor, buried deep in the New Forest. Helping with children Hera and Teddy is Big Rita, a young nanny with a sad history of her own.
It doesn’t help to find Foxcote ramshackle and run by a sinister housekeeper, especially with Jeannie going bonkers upstairs. It’s a little bit Rebecca, a touch Jane Eyre; even, given Rita’s courage and good humour, a tad Sound Of Music.
But its powerful forest atmosphere is all its own, especially once a mysterious baby is found abandoned in the heart of the woods.
Who is she, and — more importantly — whose? Hera and Rita are the 70s narrators, joined in the here and now by Sylvie, whose teenage daughter Annie has just become pregnant herself.
But what is their connection to the Foxcote events so many years before? This gorgeous meditation on motherhood is one of my favourite reads so far this year.
WHERE WE BELONG
WHERE WE BELONG by Anstey Harris (S&S £14.99, 384 pp)
by Anstey Harris (S&S £14.99, 384 pp)
I really enjoyed Harris’s debut, The Truths And Triumphs Of Grace Atherton, in which a woman shipwrecked by love finds solace in musical instruments. Here we are in similar territory of domestic and emotional difficulty.
Narrator Cate, in freefall following the suicide of her husband, is made redundant from her teaching job.
Financial necessity forces Cate and her son Leo, who has Down’s Syndrome, to leave London for the only home available: a Victorian seaside museum full of glass cases and stuffed animals.
Cate’s husband was an heir to the property and it has now devolved to his son. Not everyone is thrilled to see them, least of all a gloomy resident curator. But Cate is determined to make the most of this new life and reinvigorate the struggling museum.
She hasn’t banked on falling in love again, but when a blue-eyed artist turns up with personal baggage and a bottle of wine, what’s a girl to do?
Can he be trusted though, and what other secrets lurk in the museum’s shadowy corridors?
Events build to an exciting and moving ending as Harris, with her crew of colourfully offbeat characters, navigates beautifully through the choppy waters of guilt, heartbreak and redemption.