Its my stop on the final day of this tour. Thanks to Duckworth Books for my copy, and to Random Things Tours for organising.
Detangling the plot:
London, 1665. It is five years since King Charles II returned from exile, the scars of the English Civil Wars are yet to heal and now the Great Plague engulfs the land. Alethea Hawthorne is safe inside the walls of the Calverton household as a companion to their daughter. She waits in anticipation of her brother William’s pardon for killing a man in a duel before they can both return to their ancestral home in Measham Hall.
But when Alethea suddenly finds herself cast out on the streets of London, a long road to Derbyshire lies ahead of her. Militias have closed their boroughs off to outsiders for fear of contamination. Fortune smiles on her when Jack appears, an unlikely travelling companion who helps this determined country girl to navigate a perilous new world of religious dissenters, charlatans and a pestilence that afflicts peasants and lords alike.
Anna Abney's immersive debut is a fast-paced, multi-layered novel that intimately explores the social and religious divides at the heart of the Restoration period.
Bobs and Books honest review:
This book is structured in 3 parts based on Althea's location- London, Epping Forest, and Measham Hall. I liked the structure of this as it gave a sense of place where a lot of everything else seemed so uncertain and mysterious.
Althea is a great female lead. She's strong, resilient, daring and kind too. Her character is planted unexpectedly in a very difficult situation and most women of that class and time period would probably have struggled enormously, whereas she takes it on and battles through.
This is set at the time of plague, so if you are feeling particularly sensitive about Covid/restrictions etc this may not be the right time for you to read this. It did concern me how much of the plague responses felt all too relatable this many years on! However, this did not spoil the book for me in any way. This time period is packed with conflict- the backdrop of the English Civil War, religious tensions too. These components make this a particular era that draws you in.
Overall, a very pleasant read. Packed with drama, shocks, with some great minor characters.
About the author:
Anna Abney is among the last descendants of the Abney family, former residents of Measham Hall, a lost house of Derbyshire. The Master of Measham Hall trilogy is a fictionalised account of her ancestors' lives. An academic in the English and Creative Writing department at the Open University, she wrote her PhD on the seventeenth century writer, Margaret Cavendish, the first English woman to be published in her own name. Her writing includes fiction, journalism and drama. Anna was born and raised in London, lived in Ireland, North and South, for thirteen years before returning to the Big Smoke. She now lives in rural Kent with her husband, a playwright and screenwriter, and their border-collie.
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