I chose this one to listen to today as it’s been on my backlist forever.
I saw it on my library audio so downloaded it as I knew I had things to do today so listening would be better as I’m trying to read through some books I’ve had in an age (you readers know what I mean)

I found this doomy and gloomy.

A lot of the sequences didn’t make sense, it was quite choppy and disjointed in places.
My mind was trying to keep up, maybe it was the narrator or was it me?

So tonight I read the final couple of chapters on my Kindle.
Slightly better as I could interpret the writing differed than the narrators input on it.

It was ok, but not impactful on me.

The historical aspect was good though from the 1500’s.

TW: I will be discussing sexual assault in this review.

Tell me a book is a thriller set in Elizabethan England and it’s a book I want to get my hands on. Sadly, I didn’t enjoy The Cursed Wife as much as I thought I would.

This novel has a lot of potential. Mary lives in Elizabethan London with her merchant husband, their children and their servants, but that’s not the name they know her by. To them, Mary is Catherine; a noblewoman who joined their household years before as a widow with an infant daughter.

After an accident in Mary’s youth, she has convinced herself she’s been cursed and is going to end her life on the gallows. When she’s unexpectedly reunited with her childhood friend, Cat, who knows her secret, things begin to spiral out of control.

The Cursed Wife is fairly short as historical fiction goes – my edition is just under 250 pages – so it’s a quick read, which works for the kind of novel that it’s trying to be. I love a good chunky book, but I tend to prefer shorter thrillers because it’s hard to maintain the suspense throughout 400 pages of novel, and The Cursed Wife gets into the nitty gritty of the story almost immediately.

It doesn’t hurt that Hartshorne’s writing is very readable. There were certain ways in which she brought the Elizabethan era to life, whether it was mentioning a certain type of clothing or how Mary bought her goods at the marketplace, that I really enjoyed, but I can’t say I felt like I was in London. I’m not actually the biggest fan of London as a setting simply because it’s probably the most used setting when it comes to books set in the UK – especially historical fiction – and I’d much rather read about somewhere else, but if an author is going to choose London as their setting I’d like to feel like I’m in London.

Personally I felt like The Cursed Wife could have been set anywhere, and with Mary as a prosperous merchant’s wife I got more of a Netherlands feel than a London feel, which just goes to show how much of an impact the setting in Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist had on me.

My biggest problem with this novel, though, was the characters. Mary I liked; my favourite parts of the novel were the quiet, domestic scenes when she shared what her duties were as a wife and mother. In a way I wish Hartshorne had written a historical romance novel because I was so intrigued by the relationship between Mary and her husband, Gabriel, and I’d’ve been happy to read 250 pages of Mary pottering about her house because the domestic scenes were the scenes Hartshorne wrote best.

Instead we have a historical thriller about the toxic relationship between Mary and Cat and, honestly, I found the whole thing incredibly frustrating. It’s easy to see where the novel’s going; from the prologue we know one of the women is dead by the end of the novel and it’s easy to see how we get to that turn of events fairly early on. I wouldn’t have a problem with that if it was done well, but I found it hard to believe that Mary could be so naive.

On top of that, Cat is awful. I love unlikable women so Cat should have been the kind of character I could get behind, especially because I’m sure we’re not supposed to warm to her, but she’s not unlikable – she’s just plain nasty. Hartshorne tries to make us understand her, and there are things she goes through that will make any reader empathise with her, but for the most part she’s horrid to the point of feeling like a caricature rather than a character. I couldn’t understand how Mary didn’t see right through her.

I’m so bored of historical fiction involving women being mean to each other and sexual assault. Sexual assault is an important topic and there are so many authors who handle it brilliantly, but I didn’t like how it was handled here. There’s a fairly graphic scene of sexual assault – by which I mean the whole event is described to us, rather than hinted at – so please keep that in mind if you find that kind of content difficult to read.

What frustrated me, though, is that the man who carries out the assault is yet another caricature I often see in historical fiction and, while I don’t doubt that men like him did (and still do) exist, I think it’s lazy to fall back on this trope. Anyone who has experienced sexual assault has dealt with it in a different way, and I don’t want to suggest for a moment that the way Mary overcomes it is disingenuous, but it seemed brushed under the carpet far too easily for the sake of the plot.

Later, when Mary is happily married, she tells the reader how passionately she and Gabriel love one another. Considering we got a full description of her assault, I think it’s a shame we didn’t get a whole scene of her having happy, consensual sex with her husband. Not only to take the sting out of how horrid that earlier scene is to read, but also because there was the chance there for Hartshorne to explore how Gabriel makes sex safe and enjoyable for her when her only previous experience has been violent.

Sadly there’s no time for any of this nuance because the plot rushes along so quickly that the characters are running to keep up. They tell the reader a lot of things to make up for the fact that Hartshorne has no time to show it, so by the time the novel reaches its conclusion I was left rather underwhelmed. What’s most frustrating is that there are the bones of a really good novel in here, but it’s not the novel we get.

Ultimately I wish Hartshorne had given me a historical romance about Mary and Gabriel, the only characters in the book who actually feel real, rather than a thriller about women’s friendship turned sour. Women being unnecessarily mean to one another in a setting that’s already inherently misogynist is not something I’m interested in reading anymore.

A book with such depth and detail! Sometimes it was a little bit too much, but I do feel that it added to the general atmosphere and would work very well for someone not used to writings set in 1500s England. The book was also a little long, however Hartshorne has a beautiful prosaic way of writing. Depending on the concept (and length!), I may pick up more work from her in the future.

I really found this book interesting and it's not often I would say I've read a thriller and enjoyed it. The two female leads, Catherine and Mary, are both given their own voices and tell the story from their perspective and i think this works well for the tale as you get to see the motive why they did something. The further i progressed through the book, the more i sided with Mary and felt that she was in grave danger. and wanted to protect.
The way that Hartshorne built this world was done well as the supporting characters and the details that make up the story have the air of authenticity and this made me believe this historical thriller even more.

Having previously read Pamela Hartshorne’s time-slip novel The Edge of Dark, I found her latest book, The Cursed Wife, both similar and different. Similar in that they both explore the lives of women in Elizabethan England; different because this one is set entirely in the past, with no modern day storyline and no form of time travel.

The Cursed Wife is written from the perspectives of two women, Mary and Cat, who are both friends and rivals. When we first meet Mary in 1590 she appears to be leading a happy and contented life; she is married to the merchant Gabriel Thorne, and lives with him, their children and their servants in a comfortable house in London. Mary is devoted to her family and her household and has almost – but not quite – managed to forget that she was cursed as a child and predicted to die by hanging.

However, Mary’s whole life is built around lies and deception and she knows that if the truth is ever revealed she could lose everything. One rainy day she sets out to do some shopping in Sopers Lane to replenish her stocks of herbs and medicines, and is shocked to see a face from her past – a face she had expected never to see again. It’s Cat, her childhood friend, who was once as close to her as a sister, but who now possesses the secrets that could ruin Mary’s life…

As I’ve said, I found this a very different sort of book from The Edge of Dark; it doesn’t have such an eerie atmosphere and lacks the touches of the supernatural – although Mary does have a very creepy one-armed wooden doll called Peg. Instead the focus is on the relationship between Mary and Cat. It’s a relationship which changes and transforms itself over the years as the roles of the two women in each other’s lives are reversed, but the links between them are seemingly unbreakable and their stories are very closely entwined.

Cat and Mary take turns to narrate in alternating chapters and although their narrative voices are very similar, the author does use a few techniques to distinguish between the two – for example, Cat’s thoughts are often aimed directly at Mary (‘you say this’ and ‘you do that’). Cat is also a more bitter person than Mary, who can often seem quite naive and slow to understand things that are obvious to the reader. Neither woman is very likeable and although Cat is nastier, I can’t really say that my sympathies were with Mary either.

Pamela Hartshorne has written about the Elizabethan period before, not just in The Edge of Dark, but in other novels too, and she obviously knows it well. We are given lots of little details on domestic life in the late 16th century – the food people ate, the clothes they wore, the tasks carried out by servants in the home – and although historical events happening in the wider world have little direct effect on the story, there’s a sense of how precarious life could be in this period when hanging is a punishment for crime and when the most minor of illnesses can result in death. The novel also looks at the roles of women and the expectations that were placed on them regarding marriage.

The Cursed Wife is an interesting read and the storyline was compelling enough to hold my attention until the end, but I did prefer The Edge of Dark and as her earlier books all seem to be time-slip novels like that one I think I’ll have to investigate them at some point.

London 1590. ‘The Cursed Wife’ by Pamela Hartshorne starts with two un-named women in a room; one alive, one dead. And then follows the story of two women who meet as children, Cat and Mary, mistress and maid. Page by twisting page the story of Cat and Mary unfolds as, you can’t help but wonder, which one dies and which lives.
Mistress Mary Thorne sometimes forgets she is cursed. It is 1590 and she steps out into the rain to buy herbs for an ill maid, little knowing her life will be changed. Two stories are told in parallel; from 1562 when the two girls first meet, and 1590 when their paths cross again in London. There is a tug of power between the two as fortunes rise and fall; Cat is envious of what Mary has, while Mary feels guilt at every small slight she has made in her life.
In 1562, Mary is a gentleman’s daughter; orphaned by sickness, she is put into a cart to be taken to the house of a distant cousin where she has been offered shelter. Her solace is Peg, the small wooden doll given to her by her father. When a mob of urchins sets on the cart, one girl grabs Peg and in her haste Mary pushes her. The girl falls and dies. An old woman who sees it happen, curses Mary saying the truth of what she has done will haunt her for the rest of her life. Mary arrives at Steeple Tew, the manor of her relations, and there meets the daughter of the house, Cat. Mary is to be her maid. The two girls become companions, though a pecking order is retained as they grow into young women, until sickness again enforces a change of circumstances.
This is a novel about social mobility, up as well as down, and adjusting to life’s events. It is about destiny; making your own, or expecting it as a right. Cat is an over-indulged child who becomes a spoiled young woman used to everything in life. Though is too simplistic to say Cat is selfish and Mary a saint, you do feel that Cat will always be dissatisfied with her lot. Mary thinks, “Cat sees the world not through a window as others do, but in a looking glass that reflects back what she wishes to see.”
This is a dark tale of bitterness, blame, jealousy and resentment. The two girls are mirror images of each other, but inverted; both start as gentleman’s daughters, both are brought low by circumstances, one adapts, the other does not. This is a curiously modern novel with a young woman confident of her entitlement, regardless of her actions and choices. Everyone, the story makes clear, has choices and must live by those, accepting responsibility for one’s own life.
Hartshorne is a brilliant writer of atmosphere. When Cat marries George, the two girls move to Haverley Court. Though it is newly-built, Mary sees threats everywhere. “To me, the house was a living creature, watching me slyly. Its shadows tiptoed behind me as I walked through it. I would feel them like a breath on the back of my neck and my skin would prickle.” Adding to the haunted atmosphere is the doll Peg, a kind of bellwether, whose painted face changes its expression forewarning of events happening to Mary.
The Elizabethan setting is full of wonderful detail from food to under-garments, but there were times when it became a little too much.
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/

The Elizabethan thriller The Cursed Wife by Pamela Hartshorne is a change of direction from my usual genre. With the historical setting, I couldn’t resist. It tells the story of Mary and Cat as we slowly uncover their past and understand why their lives are irreconcilably intertwined. The theme of Mary being cursed follows her throughout the novel and is tied to the doll she keeps with her; this doll seems to have powers of its own and changes its expression to foreshadow events, a subtle but terrifying addition.
The trouble that Mary finds herself in is mostly not her fault and you really for her as she struggles to keep her perfect life together. It’s a story of self-fulfilling prophecy. The ending is at once heart-breaking yet undeniable; it also leaves the story open for a potential sequel. Cat is a character I find myself disliking the whole way through; I couldn’t find any redeemable qualities in her but could understand her situation at times.
The story is told from the perspective of the two women and it’s a great insight to see their different takes on the same event. If you like historical fiction and thrillers, I’d definitely recommend this book.

“Sometimes I forget that I am cursed”, says Mary as she wakes to the pitter patter of rain on the roof of her merchant’s house, on Little Wood Street, in the Elizabethan city of London. And as her household stirs on this ordinary day in March, 1590, Mary puts on her shift and begins the day that will change her life forever.

Beautifully written and wonderfully evocative of the mean, and often, dangerous time period of Elizabethan England, The Cursed Wife is ultimately the story of two women, each with a thirst for self-preservation, and who have been so viciously hurt by the circumstances of their lives, that nothing, and no-one, can stop the momentum of their deadly downward spiral.

Filled with scurrilous gossip, dark innuendo and the creeping power of superstition, parts of The Cursed Wife made my blood run cold, and such is the richness of the story telling that I felt as though I occupied a privileged position in the household on Little Wood Street, quietly waiting, with Peg the doll on my lap, and fearfully watching, as the story begins.

The mystery at the heart of the story is sharp and precise and, as the unease drifts and lingers, there gathers about it a vibrant sort of energy which has its roots in darkness and vengeance, and which tells of the ruthlessness of ambition and of lives which been ruined by a deadly game of chance.

The Cursed Wife is something of a change of direction for the author as her previous novels have had some element of time slip about them, however, this story is very firmly placed in one time frame, and it is in this complex and convoluted Elizabethan mystery where the real strength of the story lies.

Deeply disturbing and deliciously moody, The Cursed Wife is one of those fabulous stories which lingers long after the last page is turned.

I have read all of Pamela Hartshornes books and I must say she never disappoints. Her books are rich with descriptions of the time they are set (This time the sixteenth century) and you can really feel you are there. I did find it hard to warm to either of the main female characters as they were both only out to please themselves however this did not detract from a well written and enjoyable read. The doll Peg gave the book a slightly spooky edge .
But Pamela can we have more timeslipping next time?

Firstly I would like to thank Pan Macmillan and Net Galley for an advanced copy of this book. I really enjoyed this story and Pamela Hartshorne's novels get better and better. I was gripped from the beginning and her descriptions of what is happening pull you into the story. You feel as if you are actually there witnessing the events first hand, If you want a good story to get you through this freezing weather look no further,

Mary,wife of a successful London merchant in the 16th century is the main character in this page turner. Mary,when a child, was cursed and that curse hangs over her throughout her life. She has a close friend named Cat but their relationship is based on a lie that will never go away. The longer the lie is allowed to continue the nearer Mary gets to the curse's prediction....which said she would die on the gallows. Any further information would spoil this good read.
Good descriptions of London ,the houses and style of living at that time plus believable characters make for a good ,historical thriller.
My thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for the advanced copy of this book.

This was an enjoyable read, the prose flowed and the charecters were engaging.

"A gripping historical thriller by the author of Time's Echo, Pamela Hartshorne.
The Cursed Wife is a page-turning, psychological thriller set in Elizabethan London, by the author of Time's Echo, Pamela Hartshorne.
Mary is content with her life as wife to Gabriel Thorne, a wealthy merchant in Elizabethan London. She loves her husband and her family, is a kind mistress to the household and is well-respected in the neighbourhood. She does her best to forget that as a small girl she was cursed for causing the death of a vagrant child, a curse that predicts that she will hang. She tells herself that she is safe.
But Mary's whole life is based on a lie. She is not the woman her husband believes her to be, and when one rainy day she ventures to Cheapside, the past catches up with her and sets her on a path that leads her to the gibbet and the fulfilment of the curse."

Mary and Cat were ladies, living through the Elizabethan times as friends. Mary hides a secret and feels that she is cursed and tries to live a life that will attone.

I cannot say that it is the best book i have read so far, but it is not without it charms.

I loved this book. Compelling characters and a rich tapestry weaving Mary and cats voices. Twist ending I really didn't see coming. Looking forward to hearing more from this author

This is a story told mainly by two narrators, Cat and Mary. Catherine is the mistress of her comfortable and well-ordered house, respected in the local community for her herbal remedies, married to merchant Gabriel Thorne and living with the children from their previous marriages. Into this seemingly respectable setup comes a face from Catherine's past and everything changes; her previous deeds come back to haunt her and she has to fight for what is precious to her.

The two narrators were cleverly written so that information is revealed slowly over the course of the novel. Just as the reader makes sense of the situation, another revelation changes everything, blurs the lines of morality or shifts our sympathies. Nothing is ever as it seems, a sense added to by the addition of the very creepy doll that seems to mirror her owner's emotions. There is a pervading sense of unease throughout, which kept me reading because I wanted to know how it could possibly all work out. I also loved the Elizabethan setting as it added another dimension to the fragility of Catherine's position with its sense that life is inherently dangerous in a time of disease, hangings and the relatively arbitrary application of law.

A few things did niggle within the narrative - Cat's use of 'you' as if she was talking to Mary did start to grate, as did continued repetition of various motifs. However, these were small things and I was more than happy to keep reading.

Overall, I'd recommend this to people who enjoy historical fiction with a bit of an edge. There's nothing cosy about this story and the menace stays with you long after you turn the final page.

I really enjoyed "The Cursed Wife". The writing is great, the plot is really intriguing and the characters are well developed. I really enjoyed reading from Mary's point of view because she is an interesting character eaten up by guilt but always trying to make up for what she perceives as her sins. Cat's point of view was equally interesting but for very different reasons. The ending was also done really well and, at least to me, was really unexpected.

Set in the 1590’s London the story is told from the very different view points of 2 women, Mary and Cat, once like sisters but now accomplices to the murder of Cats husband and worlds apart until fate brings them back together changing their lives yet agin.

There is a lot of attention to detail in the descriptions of the streets of London and the parlours of the upper class, there is one part that especially stands out for me for the authenticity and that was the preparations that the household went to for a grand party. The food made me feel a wee bit queasy! Roasted Porpoise!! Yuck! I’d never heard that one before, mind you I did have a bit of a blonde moment and for some reason I thought that was a hedgehog!! The only explanation i can offer in my defence was that it was about 4am and I’d had no sleep! 🙂

Anyway, after googling roast porpoise I now know that is a type of whale that looks similar to a dolphin. And who said reading fiction novels can’t be educational!

As for the 2 protagonists they are both fascinating and a little bit sinister in their own individual and combined personalities. A psychiatrist would have a field day with these 2. The story line with the curse is threaded throughout the entire story along with an old wooden doll that’s plain creepy!

This book offers so much as well as being a historical novel, there is elements of romance, mystery, thriller, crime and even a twist of the paranormal. So all in all this will definitely appeal to a wide variety of audience.

I think House of Shadows is still my favourite of Pamela Hartshorne’s novels but this one is almost up there with it. If you have read her previous books then you will enjoy this one and it is most certainly one to look out for.

Would I recommend this book? Absolutely positively YES!

One to put on everyone’s TBR list!