If I could Tell You by Elizabeth Wilhide

This book is probably categorised as historical romance, which strictly speaking it is, as it opens in Suffolk in 1939 and is most definitely about love.  But don’t be fooled as it is about so much more:  a mother’s love, a woman’s place, and the awfulness of war on the home front.

Julia Compton has a good life, her husband provides, her son is at a good boarding school and her housekeeper runs the household while she plays the piano. And then one day while watching a film crew on the cliff near her home she falls in love. Nothing has prepared her for the turmoil of being his new partner and the reader is swept along with her helpless passion.

I shall say no more of the narrative, but can recommend this book as a good read as well as giving so much insight into relationships in the context of a suffocating time for women and an exciting time for men.

Published by Penguin Book UK in hardback RRP £12.99

Husband or monster?

The Widow by Fiona Barton

Compared to best-selling psychological thrillers The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl this novel is as good a read as either of them.

The author has taken the disappearance of a child as the central plot which elicits our involvement immediately; there is no murder or other crimes to be solved:  just the heart-breaking child abduction.

Using the characters of the Detective, the Reporter, the Mother and once the Husband it is the Widow only who speaks in the first person and thereby keeps us guessing.  The guessing is what keeps the narrative moving and it is not until the last page that the denouement finally takes place.

Published by Transworld in hardback RRP £12.99