Attention all you readers out there who love a good story, I have one for you. I’m talking no fancy-shmancy writing techniques; nothing experimental. I mean a good yarn. A story that can transport you to a different place even if you have no frame of reference to this place.
A few years ago Kate Morton released her first American book The House at Riverton. I was immediately sucked into this tale of an English country estate house with a history and a mystery. Well this seems to be a recurring theme that Kate can’t quite get away from, and that is fine by me. Her second book The Forgotten Garden was even better than the first. You absolutely fall in love with her female protagonists in every story she writes.
Well Kate Morton is giving us a new great story this year, The Distant Hours. I am about 265 pages into my advanced reader copy and I can’t put it down. The story starts out with a long lost letter written decades ago being delivered to the addressee. And this begins a whole world of memories and secrets flooding back into the narrator’s mother’s life and into the narrator’s life for the first time. Edie, our main character, is at once curious about this letter from the past. It is a letter from the woman who took Edie’s mother in as an evacuee during part of WWII. Edie’s mother stayed with this woman, Juniper Blythe, and her two significantly older twin sisters for over a year. Did I mention that the sister’s lived in an old family castle named Milderhurst? Well they do and the house is just overflowing with secrets.
Although Ms. Morton has already written two books focused around old English country estates the stories couldn’t be more different. All three of these books are absolute gems in themselves and all deserve to be read.
In the meantime, there’s an unusual video to make you even more curious about Kate’s next book. -Ellen
The Distant Hours by Kate Morton from Pan Macmillan on Vimeo.
The Distant Hours was released in November of 2010.
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