Firstly let me say something about the absolutely stunning cover for this book. The variety of colours of the flowers against a black background really draws the eye. I can see a lot of people picking up this book for the cover!

This is such a beautiful book for many different reasons. I loved the characters in the book and the journey, literally at times, that they go on. All of them are lonely characters, on the fridges of society. They are sleep walking through life, just trying to get by with little or no friends. Both Dove and Peter before him go on a journey of discovery as they try to unravel the mystery of what happened to the plane. I so enjoyed reading about this journey and it was heartwarming to see how much they had changed and learnt about themselves at the end.

The author has such a wonderful way of describing things that makes the reader feel that they are right there experiencing things alongside the characters. The vivid descriptions of the places they visit are stunning as is the descriptions of the unusual flowers they discover on the way. I hadn’t heard of a lot of these flowers and I enjoyed looking up all of them. I had heard of the usual looking Corpse flower however as it was featured in an episode of Go jetters!

The mystery is gradually unraveled and it was very interesting to see how it all comes together. It was a very addictive story which made the book hard to put down as I wanted to read more to discover what happened. I was also really invested in the characters and wanted to continue reading to see if they get a happy ending.

This is the first book by this author that I have read and I look forward to reading more from him in the future. If you like mysteries with heart and some beautiful descriptions you will love this book.

Huge thanks to Emma Finnigan and Picador Books for my copy of this book and Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for inviting me on the blog tour.

Have you noticed how many botanical titles and covers are out there this year? If you appreciate this publishing trend as much as I do, and especially if you enjoyed Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, I can highly recommend The Long Forgotten. David Whitehouse’s third novel features plant hunting everywhere from Chile to Namibia, but it opens underwater: Professor Jeremiah Cole is in a submersible 200 miles west of Perth, Australia. He’s running out of oxygen down there when he collides with a goose-beaked whale that pulls his craft to the surface. The injured whale soon dies, and when the professor’s crew brings its corpse on board to perform an autopsy, they discover in its belly the black box of Flight PS570, lost on its way from Jakarta to London 30 years ago and dubbed “The Long Forgotten.”

Whitehouse’s inspiration for the novel was the Malaysian Airlines flight that went missing in 2014, along with a story he read about the Rafflesia “corpse flower” 15 years ago. After the curious incident with the whale, more gentle magic is to come as we meet Dove, a lonely young man who works as an ambulance dispatcher in present-day London and starts tuning into the memories of Peter Manyweathers. In 1980s New York City, Peter gave up cleaning the houses of the dead to chase after the exotic plants mentioned in a love letter he found in an encyclopedia. Through a local botanical etching club he met Dr. Hens Berg, a memory researcher from Denmark, who encouraged him in the quest. Soon Peter was off to China and Gibraltar to find rare plants under a washing machine or along a steep cliff face. Along the way he fell in love and had to decide whom to trust and what was of most value to him.

How Peter and Dove are connected is a mystery whose unspooling is a continual surprise. I found it quite unusual that this novel ends with the plane crash; I can think of books that start with one, like Before the Fall by Noah Hawley, but no others that end on one. This late flashback to the crash, followed by a memorial service delivered by Prof. Cole, proves that the flight’s victims are far from forgotten. The mixture of genres, including magic realism, made me think of Haruki Murakami, and Whitehouse’s style is also slightly reminiscent of Joshua Ferris and Mark Haddon. Themes of memory and family, along with vivid scenes set around the globe and bizarre plants that trap sheep or reek of death, make this book stand out. If any of these elements even vaguely appeal to you, it’s well worth taking a chance on it.

A favorite passage:

“There on a ledge no bigger than an upturned hand was the Gibraltar campion. It was about forty centimeters high, with sun-kissed green leaves, no more interesting to the casual observer than any houseplant, quite ugly even. But nestled amongst the leaves, swaying, Peter found a small and beautifully detailed bilobed flower. White from a distance, up close an ethereal explosion of colour washed across the petals, from pink to purple. Elegant and soft, but surviving here, battered like a lighthouse by the wind and waves, a candle lit inside a tempest.

Peter was overcome by the sheer unlikeliness of its existence, and felt a kinship with the flower that seemed to distort him for a second. Above them, an infinite number of galaxies, planets and possibilities. Unknowns of a number that cannot be expressed. Yet here, on a protruding ledge and at the end of a rope, endless variables had colluded to bring him and the flower together.”