Most museums contain artifacts that can tell you of a time or place. However, most artifacts are impersonal and have a universal story behind them. The items in this museum tell the individual stories, those that lie behind the object, those that reveal so much more than what the item on show tells you at a surface level.

This is the premise of The Museum of Broken Promises by Elizabeth Buchan. Our protagonist Laure has a past, one that she has been trained to keep secret, one that she has been hiding for many years but when her past comes back into her life Laure has to confront issues that she has been keeping at a safe distance. At a distance to stop herself from being hurt.

The Museum of Broken Promises is a brilliant historical fiction which transports you to two different time periods - both very different but both very influenced by the ravages of conflict. You see the realities of these time periods but by having a character be the face of these time periods they become all the more real which is a hard thing to do given that the novel is fictional.

The Museum of Broken Promises is a powerful read.

The Museum of Broken Promises by Elizabeth Buchan is available now.

For more information regarding Elizabeth Buchan (@elizabethbuchan) please visit www. Elizabethbuchan.com.

For more information regarding Atlantic Books (@AtlanticBooks) please visit www.atlantic-books.co.uk.

This book is both beautiful and sad. There are so many moments where I found myself needing to pause that after a while, I stopped noting them and went with the flow. I'm glad I had the chance to read this.

The book didn't live up to expectations and I couldn't really get into it. The style was not for me. I might try again another time as the errors didn't help either.

Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Thank you NetGalley for my review copy of this book

I expected to like this book a lot more as the blurb description sounded exactly up my street…unfortunately this was not the case. The characters bored me and the description was too slow. Did not finish.

The Museum of Broken Promises by Elizabeth Buchan is a heart wrenching story set in 1985 in Prague, mid 1990s in Berlin and modern day Paris.  You see Prague whilst the Communists are in power, Berlin when post the different sides are making peace after the Berlin Wall coming down.

Laure is the central character whom we follow to each of these places.  It is in Prague that she falls in love, and in Paris that she is the chief curator of the Museum of Broken Promises, with different things that have been donated, such as a baby's shoe, and a train ticket.

This is a look at a dark period of history, behind the Iron Curtain, and shows how dangerous life was.  The story is well told, leading through revelations, and moments of clarity, whilst showing so much emotion. 

 The Museum of Broken Promises  was published on 5th September 2019, and is available from  Amazon ,  Waterstones  and  Bookshop.org .

You can follow Elizabeth Buchan on  Twitter ,  Facebook  and her  website .

I have also read Two Women in Rome by Elizabeth Buchan, and you can read my review  here .

I was given this book in exchange for an unbiased review, so my thanks to NetGalley and to  Atlantic Books .

My feelings about this book are a real anomaly, the writing itself is exquisite and beautifully manipulated to portray some very dark times in political history. The pace generally was slower than I would have liked, understandably though as the threads of different eras are drawn together.

Laure is a quiet, reserved character, who has established The Museum of Broken Promises in Paris. A fascinating concept, displaying exhibits donated by people who want to demonstrate loss, disappointment and betrayal. Each item carries its own unique backstory and explanation & I particularly enjoyed the parts of the story where new exhibits were unwrapped, or when patrons brought them in hoping for acceptance into the museum.

The story switches from Paris ‘now’, back to 1985/6 when Laure, was an au pair to a Czechoslovakian family, based in Paris originally before returning, along with Laure, to Prague.

Here the story portrays the darkness, fear and desperation of living in a tightly controlled communist country. Running alongside this is the naivety and innocence of the young Laure as she embarks upon a challenging love affair with a ‘pop star’ / musician and dissident Tomas. The description throughout clearly depicts the harshness of the setting whilst bringing to life the passion and love between Laure and Tomas.

The story also jumps to Laure working for the government in Berlin, after the end of the Cold War and we see her meet up again with Petr, her former employer and a ‘trusted’ member of the Czech communist party.

There are a lot of unknown threads to the story, hints as to what has been torturously unknown for many years, and we can reflect on how life and circumstances have changed the characters. I will be reflecting back over the threads and the ending for sometime. A slow burn, beautifully written tale of dark, oppressive times.

Heart in mouth and heartening read. A fascinating journey through fairly recent history. A spy story of a very different order. You won't want it to finish. WONDERFUL

This book felt a bit flat and a lot of too long for me. The writing was beautiful but the story didnt really interested me much. I pushed through, but without caring for anything going on, unfortunatelly.

A fascinating yarn I think about often. While it started off as quite an unassuming book, the historical fiction element and love story was just so entertaining, and some of the scenes are still burned in my mind, months later.

Would recommend to anyone interested in learning about life behind the Iron Curtain.

With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher.

A slow read and took me a while to get into this one. The storyline was good but I just found this failed to keep me interested.

I am in charge of the senior library and work with a group of Reading Ambassadors from 16-18 to ensure that our boarding school library is modernised and meets the need of both our senior students and staff. It has been great to have the chance to talk about these books with our seniors and discuss what they want and need on their shelves. I was drawn to his book because I thought it would be something different from the usual school library fare and draw the students in with a tempting storyline and lots to discuss.
This book was a really enjoyable read with strong characters and a real sense of time and place. I enjoyed the ways that it maintained a cracking pace that kept me turning its pages and ensured that I had much to discuss with them after finishing. It was not only a lively and enjoyable novel but had lots of contemporary themes for our book group to pick up and spend hours discussing too.
I think it's important to choose books that interest as well as challenge our students and I can see this book being very popular with students and staff alike; this will be an excellent purchase as it has everything that we look for in a great read - a tempting premise, fantastic characters and a plot that keeps you gripped until you close its final page.

A beautifully-written book and a wonderfully original and intriguing concept. The love story was incredibly moving and well done, as you would expect of Buchan. I found it a little difficult to get into, so went back at a later date.

This is a very visual book - beautifully written, one can almost feel and see the cities and the locales. I got very invested in Laura and Tomas' journey. Well-worth a read.

Laure has set up a museum of broken promises in Paris where the exhibits are personal items belonging to people that signify betrayal and broken promises. We then go back in time to find out about the broken promises of Laure and the time she spent in Prague in 1986 with the loss of Tomas the rock star that she fell in love with in the strictly communist country.

I enjoyed the premise of the story but found it quite hard work to read and to get into, especially as I found I couldn't really relate to Laure. I was a bit disappoint as I have previously really enjoyed books by this author

When I saw Elizabeth Buchan’s name on the programme of my local literary festival last summer, I recalled reading her books back in the day. It was before I moved home to Cornwall and I read most of them from the library, but I remember buying a copy of one of them for my mother and her enjoying it.

Those books were stories set in the recent past, and I stopped reading when the stories became more contemporary and more domestic.

When I read the programme I saw that there was a new novel that looked more akin to the novels I had read years ago, and that looked rather interesting, so I invested in a ticket to the event.

I was captivated by the extracts from the book that the author read, and what she said about the arc of her career was instructive. It echoed the arc of her life: and so the books had different settings and time periods when she had the freedom to travel and to research, but stayed in the present and in domestic settings when she did not.

I loved the settings and the recent times that she explored in this novel.

The story opens in Paris in the present day, with Laure, who is the curator of a small museum that she founded. The Museum of Broken Promises displays artefacts that speak of love, loss and betrayal. You might question the viability of such a museum, but the account of the exhibits themselves, and of how they were selected from the many submissions, was absolutely fascinating.

Little was known of Laure herself. She was happy living alone, she was reluctant to speak of herself, and she only really socialised when it was necessary for her museum. On those occasions she spoke so articulately that you could understand why The Museum of Broken Promises had succeeded and what made it so important.

It was natural though that potential investors and other friends were eager to know more about the woman who had created it. An eager young journalist wanted to write about the creation of the museum, Laure was persuaded to allow the girl to shadow her for a while, and she was taken aback at how much she had found out about her past

All that she had allowed to be seen was an anonymous exhibit in her museum: a framed ticket for a train from Czechoslovakia to Austria.

Laure first came to Paris in 1985, to work as an au pair. Not long after her arrival, her employers moved to Prague. The father of the family, who was a senior executive in a pharmaceutical company had been posted there. It was a time of unrest and change in what was still a communist city, and nothing in her experience had prepared her for what she would experience there.

She visited a marionette theatre with her two young charges. They were captivated by what happened there – (as was I – it was from this part of the story that I head the author read) – and it was there that Laure met a number of performers, and that she began to fell in love with Tomas, a musician and political activist.

The love affair that grew from that drew her into dissident circles, She would become aware that they were watched by shadowy figures, and that the. Her employers were concerned, and she came to realise that there were more reasons that a job in the pharmaceutical industry for their move into the communist bloc.

Elizabeth Buchan wrote about young love quite beautifully, she told of Laure’s experiences with empathy and understanding, and the time and place were so well drawn. I could see that this novel was underpinned by reseach but that never intruded on the human story and it helped to make that story feel both distinctive and utterly real.

I understood how what happened to Laure in Prague shaped her, and how she became the woman who would create The Museum of Broken Promises.

The story moved quite naturally between the present and the past, and I found the writing in both time periods elegant, evocative and engaging.

There were some scenes set in Berlin not long after the wall fell, and I felt that they was less successful. I understood why they were necessary to the plot, I appreciated that they helped to illuminate the changes that happened in Europe between the two main time periods, but they were less engaging and less interesting than the scenes set earlier and later.

That was disappointing, but the book as a whole worked for me.

It held a distinctive story and it gave me much to think about.

A love affair and looking back to search for some meaning from the past. I'm afraid I didn't form any feeling for Laure and very soon I simply didn't care much for her story plus the technique of moving backwards and forwards in the story, left me feeling lost. If I had liked Laure I might have striven harder but I'm afraid I didn't even finish it.

I have enjoyed previous books by Elizabeth Buchan and was delighted to receive a copy of her newest book The Museum of Broken Promises. I have to say even though I enjoyed the novel, I feel it had the potential to be better. The plot at times was disjointed and some of the characters underdeveloped.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC

Thought-provoking, compelling, and intelligent consideration of our memories in the context of the cold war. It helped me to think differently about objects and their role as relics in our lives. We have gone on to hand-sell this book and have an event with the author, which proved very popular with all our readers.

Rating 3.5/5
The Museum of Broken Promises by Elizabeth Buchan
The novel crosses eras and countries, a love story with a political background. The sinister, scary Czechoslovakia of 1985 to the romantic streets of Paris. Told through the young, impressionable half English, half French Laure Carlyle.
The Museum of Broken Promises is a place I’d love to see, the stories, the emotions are heart rendering and well portrayed. Prague in 1985 such a grey, down trodden place full of Government people and the strong, young people who rose up against it. Nope, wouldn’t have wanted to be there.
I’m still in two minds about this novel, very moving and well told but I have to admit there were pages I just wanted to skip but didn’t.
Elizabeth Buchan keeps the reader interested because you want to know what happened. Worth a read if you keep going.
Thanks to Elizabeth Buchan, the publisher and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read The Museum of Broken Promises. I have given an unbiased and honest review in return.