Creepy, atmospheric, and really rather brilliant.

This book is packed with everything you could want; beautifully written and haunting long after the tale is told.

I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but it's got enough twists to keep you hooked whilst the author surrounds you in rich and vivid descriptions that bring the desolate location to life.

In all honesty I was slightly disappointed with this book. I think I was expecting more of a ghost story that would be chilling and thrilling. I also felt the book lacked pace. Thank you to NetGalley, Hodder and Stoughton and the author for the chance to review.

I enjoyed the characters, the setting, the plot, and the outcome of this book. Part mystery, part ghost story as well as the development of a relationship going through difficult times there are lots of things to recommend this book. It’s also well written and believable. My only criticisms would be one or two about living in the dales. But that would be nitpicking and I appreciate the need for these details in order to make the story work.

I was very kindly given an e-arc of this book through Netgalley and Hodder & Stoughton.

Life is too short to read books that don't grab you or even interest you after the first 100 or so pages. Even very kindly given review copies. I give honest reviews, not dressed up ones. Anyone who has been following me for a while will know that last year, I read Fran Cooper's debut 'These Dividing Walls' and really enjoyed it. Maybe it was just because I listened to it on Audible rather than physically reading it, but 'The Two Houses' just didn't bring me as much joy or intrigue as her previous book did.
Set in a tiny Yorkshire village, the novel is set around the idea of the two houses, which come with a great and tragic story about why it was separated from one into two. This myth around the village had the potential to be incredibly interesting, but the writing dragged everything out. Like so many thrillers, this book made use of the 'slightly psychotic female lead' trope, which is frustrating enough, but the writing simply made me not want to read. It felt more like literary fiction trying to be dramatic or thriller-esque, rather than an actual mystery. It was an interesting premise, but it was a bit of a let down from Cooper's previous novel.

Having thoroughly enjoyed These Dividing Walls I was very much looking forward to reading Fran Cooper’s latest book, The Two Houses. While I wasn’t disappointed I didn’t love it like I did her earlier novel.

The story is about a young couple, Simon and Jay and alternates between London and the village of Hestle on the edge of the moors, where they have just bought a new house or rather two houses that were originally one. And therein hangs a tale...

The couple decide to join the two houses back together, but all does not go to plan and the builders unearth something unexpected.

As Jay, who is recovering from a nervous breakdown, gets more obsessed with the history of the house and the secrets that the people of the village are hanging onto she becomes more withdrawn from her husband, Simon.

The writing is good: the setting atmospheric and creepy and most of the inhabitants of the village are strange or troubled in some way, but I couldn’t warm to the main characters, Jay and Simon.

Generally, an enjoyable, creepy mystery.

At first glance, this appears to be a ghost story. While the writing style is atmospheric, creepy and gothic, the content is more grounded. The ghosts are emotional, bad memories and entrenched secrets kept by the living rather than the dead.
Escaping to the country seems like a rest cure for Jay and Simon, reeling from Jay's emotional breakdown when she discovers she cannot have children. A ceramic artist Jay's work suffers until she shies away from it and everyone attached to it. Simon loves her but doesn't necessarily understand her. His constant presence is claustrophobic for his free-spirited wife. She doesn't want to share her emotions just to make him feel worthwhile.
So when they find a quirky, broken down property, two houses severed in their past. Jay loves it, and Simon who wants his wife to recover agrees, although he is looking for a bolt hole and she is searching for a new life.
The villagers are suspicious of the interloper's motives and the reasons for this gradually become clear as the story progresses. It's not just because they want to protect the secrets of the old houses, their way of life has disintegrated with the closure of the mines and farms, young people want to leave, and only the old ones and those who cannot survive elsewhere are left. They want to protect their way of life even if it's not what it once was.
The characters are realistic, as is their behaviour when confronted with newcomers. Jay becomes obsessed with the house's secrets to the exclusion of all else, but maybe this is part of her healing process?
The plot reveals its clues and misinformation as it progresses, the pacing is slow because of the detailed descriptions and the internal conflict of the main characters.
Mysterious and suspenseful but not written in a commercial, contemporary style, it is all about the characters and their interaction with the setting. It resonates as you read and the two houses' story is infinitely sadder than you first imagine.
I liked it and found the ending particularly poignant. It conveys the sense of stability and people becoming as one with the land well. It is slow and maybe too detailed in places, but it does fit with a gothic writing style and is a lovely example of this.
I received a copy of this book from Hodder and Stoughton via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I was attracted to this book because of the unusual cover and the premise sounded fascinating: an old house with the middle taken out because it's haunted!

Jay is an artist, specialising in ceramics, but has suffered a breakdown and feels a need for peace and quiet away from London. So she and her husband Simon buy a derelict house in the country - which is actually now two houses, as a previous owner took out the middle believing it to be haunted by the ghost of his wife. Despite the hostility of the villagers, Jay finds the idea of living in a haunted house both fascinating and inspiring, and is eager to investigate its history - but perhaps the past should be left alone?

I did enjoy The Two Houses but I downloaded it because I thought it was a ghost story and it wasn't really. Small items seem to disappear from one location only to turn up in another, but that is about it. There is an old mystery but the story is really about how the characters cope with living in such a bleak and hostile environment. Jay and Simon discover that living in the country isn't quite the idyll they were expecting. Tom, who runs the local pub, has never quite got over having to give up farming. The elderly Heather is old enough to remember the tragic events of the past and has no desire to see it all stirred up again. And then there is the newcomer Dev, who just wants to fit in.

Tom and Heather were my favourite characters but I didn't much like Jay, mainly because she seemed to be determined to solve the mystery of the Two Houses only to prove that she was right - and she didn't care who she hurt in the process. I did love the idea of a house so haunted it had to have a chunk taken out. The story is well-written and the setting is great, but bear in mind The Two Houses is more character study than gothic mystery or psychological thriller.


I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of this book, which will be published in the UK on the 22nd March 2018.

Thank you to Fran Cooper, Hodder & Stoughton, and Netgalley for my copy of this book, which I received in exchange for an honest review.

THE TWO HOUSES
I must confess that I was expecting more of a ghost-story aura of spookiness from the scene-setting of a strangely divided house in a bleak northern landscape, but the mystery behind it was compelling enough to keep me intrigued to the end.
Being a northerner myself, I found the stereotypical characterisation of the village community and their mistrust of outsiders led to unfortunate connotations with the 'local shops for local people' in The League of Gentlemen’s village of Royston Vasey. But apart from that niggle, there is some fine writing in this novel, especially noticeable in how well the author conveys a sense of place and the main character Jay is well realised.

A couple wants to rejoin two parts of an old house “up north”, when rumour has it that the joining bit had been demolished because it was haunted. And you think: Oh-oh...kinda obvious... Simon, the London architect husband, and Jay, the potter, err, ceramicist wife trying to restore the derelict house(s) into a bolthole from their hectic London lives and solve their relationship issues at the same time.
Unfortunately, this book was not for me. Its pace seemed glacial and I found myself repeatedly glancing at the percentage covered. In the story, things go bump in the night, random things turn up and then there is a big find. Secrets kept in the village. The landscape descriptions at times beautiful, the characters of the villagers for me too “drawer-like”: a dejected publican and his mentally retarded brother, a bitchy, jealous shop assistant, an old terminally-ill woman, a smattering of teenager-clichés, a loathed immigrant. All those references to pottery I did not find convincing, but that’s perhaps because I have been potting for years.

Having enjoyed Fran Cooper’s first novel ‘These Dividing Walls’ so much, I was keen to get my hands on her second, and was not disappointed. A very different setting from the Paris streets of her first, but she creates an equally compelling sense of place on the isolated, windswept moorland of the north of England. Her ability to create complex characters is undiminished - I was wholly engaged with the main character, Jay, an artist from London who is entranced with the landscape, the people and their secrets. The supporting cast were wholly believable, too, and provided plenty of subplots to keep the story interesting. A mystery at its heart for sure, but their interaction was the strength of the novel for me.

Some lovely writing. A couple of examples:

‘But he refuses to divulge any further information, and so the rumour takes to wing again, hovering above the village, fluttering its feathers until the air is nothing but wing-beat, loud and panicky above them.’

‘Heather lives in this world of memory now. This half-life, where everything around her is flat and empty yet thick with the resonance of days gone by. A hum below the surface. Palimpsest. A word she heard on the radio once and had to look up in the library dictionary (noun, writing material on which later writing has been superimposed)…’

One niggle - I can’t understand how this would be published under the title ‘The Two Houses’ when throughout the book the property is emphatically referred to as ‘Two Houses’. Am I missing a little wordplay here?

Fran Cooper’s taut, atmospheric and assured novel is part chilling mystery, part exploration of our keenness to keep things hidden. Jay has had one breakdown and seems to be headed for another; Simon is the doting husband keen to help his wife reconnect with her brilliance. ‘The Two Houses’ considers whether it’s really that easy to reset and restore if you relocate- in this case, to a crumbling property that’s lost it’s heart, in a beautiful village that’s made defensiveness its byword.

Arriving in Hestle, Jay and Simon find that the picturesque setting isn’t immune to racism, closed minds and protectionism; it’s a local town for local people. There is a deftly handled ‘us and them’ motif that feels all too appropriate in the Brexit era. Both Jay and Simon find allies, but at what cost?

Fran Cooper shows herself as a real talent with this novel, creating wholly believable characters and a plot that never lags. The ‘second voice’ sections don’t always work but that’s a very, very minor point. A full time career as a successful novelist beckons.

Jay, a ceramics artist, has had a breakdown. She needs to get away from busy London so she & her husband, Simon, buy Two Houses in a remote area of the dales. The idea is to do it up & have weekends & the odd week away. There is a lot of superstition around Two Houses which was originally one house before a previous owner removed the middle rooms which he felt were haunted.

I really struggled with this book. The writing is just a bit too airy fairy for me. If something could be stated concisely in four words then this author would take four sentences. Everything is over described in lavish adjectives that really started to irritate me.

I got to 28% of the way through the book (the joys of ereaders, I know exactly how far through a book I am before I can't take any more!) and just gave up. By this point nothing had happened. Yes we had been inside Jay's head a lot, we knew every nook and cranny of the house and the surrounding countryside and even knew the exact nature of the rain and the mud. What we didn't know at this point was where the book was going. The scene was set but apart from some over dramatic glass breaking in the pub and the odd item seeming to be in a different place in the house and perhaps a few creaking stairs, nothing had happened.

Jay and Simon didn't endear themselves to me. Simon seemed to have had a lot of time off work so they could settle in Two Houses but apart from that I couldn't get much of a hold on his personality. Jay was frankly irritating & I wanted to give her a kick. Her depression seemed to stem from a vase she was working on breaking in the kiln - it happens. There are also elements of issues due to not being able to conceive so I did feel sympathy. However, she seemed to spend time moping around & doing what did take her fancy regardless of the amount of work that needed to be done in the house such as unpacking. She was the one who wanted to move.

The characters in the village were a bit cliched - the old man living in a filthy cottage, Jacob the young man with learning disabilities, Tom the landlord of the pub being rather tacturn. There was even a male librarian who wore garish pullovers which he liked to knit himself - really! Why can't a librarian be a hunky good looking bloke who works out at the gym? Just once, please?

This was definitely not the book for me. I was not prepared to battle through any further to discover if or when the actual story was going to start. Background & description are crucial but they are supposed to draw the reader in not bore them silly.

I received a free copy of this book via Netgalley.

I do not appreciate the description of this book with 'a discovery is made that will unearth decades-old secrets,' making it sound like this is a simple whodunnit. It is not.

This is another story (I rated These Dividing Walls with 5 stars) by Fran Cooper that has people's misery as it's main theme, but with subtle pain in the background. Regardless our history, we all have hopes and dreams, fears and regrets. But who dares 'to admit that the ghosts we make for ourselves are sometimes the most potent?'

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of this book

The most atmospheric mystery I’ve ever read. Not since The Loney have I been utterly transported to another place in such a way. Could almost taste the fog and the damp! Loved how th story unravelled and reall6 enjoyed the final third as it all came together and completely transformed my overall view by the end.
Tricky one to market as this has it all..... literary, a crumbling marriage, ghost story, a small village with big secrets... makes it a great read but took me a while to know what I was getting.