First of all, a confession from me: I have listened to The Miniaturist on Book at Bedtime and watched the television adaptation, but I haven’t read it or The Muse (but it’s high on my enormous to-read list). So, I’d say I’m a fan of Jessie Burton without having read one of her books. When the opportunity to read this popped up, I jumped at it. It’s an understatement to say it didn’t disappoint. It’s beautifully written and well characterised as well as being an out-and-out page-turner. I read the second half of the 400+ pages pretty much in one go – I had to know how things were going to pan out for Elise and Rose and Connie. The people and places ring true, and the characters’ relationships with friends and family are knotty and realistic. The ending is neatly, but not too neatly, wrapped – I felt satisfied without being spoon-fed. Now I really must get on and read the back catalogue.

I loved this book: it was beautifully written, engaging and compelling, and I fell in love with the complicated, intelligently-drawn characters. I found myself longing to read the book when I was doing other things, and I'm thinking about it days after finishing.

You will love or hate this book! I so wanted to love it but, in truth it lacked lustre. I couldn’t feel any empathy with the characters they lacked substance. It provided no insights and the book ended with me thinking ‘is that it’? I think it is beautifully written but I somehow feel cheated. Did I miss something?

Yet again another great story by Jessie Burton. So many twists and turns, so many emotions all wrapped up in a unique premise. A great read from a great writer. 5 super stars.

Rosie tracks down the only known partner of her mother – Constance. She hopes Constance can throw light on why her mother abandoned her and hopes to find the truth about her mother’s disappearance.
A well written novel of a woman’s search for her mother. So why does it all seem a bit too unreal.
.

I’ve always meant to try The Miniaturist so when I saw this novel on Netgalley I jumped at the chance.
The prose is beautiful, switching effortlessly between a past and present timeline, with mini sections of a novel embedded in a different style. The pace is slow, glacier slow, and any moments are about the characters.
Which normally would be fine, except I wasn’t massively drawn to anyone. Elise is exceptionally beautiful but filled with ennui, Connie is driven, arrogant and a touch cruel, and Rose is mostly aimless and yet selfish when she grasps for agency.
I have nothing against unresolved endings, but the trajectory of the story was pretty clear early on and it never deviated which was unsatisfying.

"You have to be practical around something that's impulsive, sometimes elusive. If you turn your soul into a business, you have to be ready for that to hurt sometimes

Jessie Burton's latest offering is an intimate, intelligent exploration of the complexity of women's lives and the depth nature of relationships in a narrative that goes back and forth in time as the lives of the three central protagonists are laid bare. In the 1980s, a young, beautiful and naive Elise Morceau meets the much older Constance Holden on Hampstead Heath. She falls for the confident and charismatic Constance, a writer whose novel is being turned into a big Hollywood movie, and follows her to Los Angeles. Whilst Constance feels comfortable and at home in the city of illusions, ambitions, glamour and lies, Elise finds herself out of her depth and finds it more problematic. Their relationship becomes increasingly fraught with conflict as it slowly begins to disintegrate. Decades later in 2017, Rose Simmons is in her mid 30s, plagued by doubts and wondering about where her life is at with her long term boyfriend, Joe, and his failing business, although her best friend, Kelly is an invaluable support and anchor.

Rose has always felt a void in her life, her mother abandoned her as a baby, and she feels a abiding need to know more about her, convinced it will make her feel more whole as a human being and contribute to a greater sense of her identity. She finds out from her father that Elise had links with Constance, a woman who had withdrawn from public life at the height of her fame and lived a reclusive existence since then. Rose embarks on a quest to discover more about her elusive mother as she inveigles her way into Constance's life under false pretenses, securing a position as her carer. She goes on to develop a lively and critically important relationship with Constance that is to form the basis of her life changing decisions as she learns to become more of who she is. There are echoes of the past in the present as the ghost of Elise hangs over and haunts Constance and Rose.

This is a beautifully written novel from Burton, the characterisations are wonderfully vibrant in a immersive narrative and there is a great sense of the differing locations of LA and London. The women that inhabit the novel, their lives and relationships are depicted with great skill and expertise, outlining the challenges they face in a manner that feels authentic. This is a fabulously compelling read about love, loss, friendship, being a mother, secrets and a search for identity that had me completely engaged and absorbed. What struck me most about it was that what it had to say about women had a universality about it that I think will make many readers love it. Many thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC.

I hadn't read anything by this author before but had heard such good things about The Miniaturist I thought I would give it a go. Sadly I found it a real struggle but I continued to read hoping it would improve.

The storyline had real potential. Though, in my opinion, it lacked any continuity; and yes, I realise it is two people's stories at different times. However, I really didn't like or empathise with the characters at all. In fact, they annoyed me quite a lot of the time.

I hoped that as it reached its finale all this would be drawn together into some sort of conclusion and in a way I suppose it did. For me, though it lacked finality and closure. I feel this is the sort of book that some people will rave over and others will feel disappointed. Sadly I fit into the latter category.

The Confession is my first Jessie Burton book, and I have a feeling I may go searching for her previous two now...

The Confession is a story of self-discovery, told in two time trails.

We meet Rose in the present; a woman who is trying to find her mother or any information about her. A mother who disappeared when she was a baby, Rose is stuck in a life rut. In a relationship that is just floating along the surface of the sea of life, in a boring job, with nothing to look forward to.

Then we travel to 1982 where we are introduced to Elise, an impressionable young woman, whose dreary life gets a wash of colour after meeting an up and coming author, Constance Holden.

Connie Holden is a common thread for both the women, and the stories that progress in both time frames, able to provide excitement for Elise, and answers for Rose.

What a fantastically told story! I found myself willing Rose to be brave, to ask all the questions she needed to ask. I wanted Elise to be strong, and not crumble under the pressures life put her under. And Constance, or Connie? I wanted her to soften...

Did she? Did any of them achieve what I hoped? Well, you'll have to read the book to find out!

Many thanks to NetGalley, Pan Macmillan and Picador for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to netgalley.co.uk for gifting me a free copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.
I was so happy to receive this book, I am a fan of Jessie Burton and have loved her previous two novels, The Muse and The Miniaturist, so I had high hopes for this one, I'm glad I was not let down by this book. I thoroughly enjoyed this book from start to finish, it didn't take me long as I was just hooked. I love the main characters, Rose, Connie and Elise and how well written they are, each character was not perfect they had their flaws but I loved reading about them and I became invested in them. They were so unique and that to me is an example of great writing.
Throughout the book, it is split into two different timelines, I think because I'm used to Burton's writing, this constant changing did not faze or take me out of the storyline or leave me confused. I simply cannot praise this book enough, it is clear that the author really researches before writing very thoroughly, I really enjoyed this and I look forward to more from Jessie Burton in future, if she narrates this audiobook, I will buy it.

Difficult to decide between 3 and 4 stars for me , this one. Jessie Burton does, no doubt, write beautifully. There are a few sentences that i ŕead, and reread again as they were so true and insightful. But I did not enjoy the story as much as her previous two novels, and for me The Miniaturist remains her most effective work. I felt that this novel was at times, a theme in search of a story. Burton writes about female identity, ambition and female relationships, similar to The Muse , exploring the themes through the female characters. So the character of Elise is fuzzy and faint on the page- deliberately so - whereas Constance is much more sharply defined by her actions and speech. Rose moves through the novel from being similar to Elise to being more like Constance, under her influence. But the characters and their arc always feel a little unreal, improbable. The secondary characters are also problematic, particularly best friend Instagram influencer Kelly, who seems to exist only to throw another angle on female identity choices. It's also something of a slow burner although the pace does pick up in the second half of the novel. Recommended overall as well worth a read, but not entirely successful for me.

Big fan of The Miniaturist here so I did a wee jig when I saw this become available on Netgalley so thank you for the opportunity.

This book is very different although similarly frustrating at the end as I’m a luddite who needs all the answers spelled out to them but if you accept that that’s what you get with this author then you will enjoy this book!

It’s well written and the characters are brilliant.

Devoured this book in one sitting. The plot is great but the real strength lies with the with creation of the 3 lead female characters. Captivatingly created. Impressive

Jessie Burton is one of my favourite storytellers so I was so excited to receive an early copy of her latest novel, The Confession, from @netgalley and @panmacmillan.

I raced through this one, I was hooked from the first chapter. The story unravels to the reader from two time periods. The first is in the eighties where Elise meets a mysterious woman in Hampstead Heath. We follow their relationship as it changes over time. The second time period is 2017, with Elise's daughter. Over time the two worlds merge and we begin to understand how everyone has ended up where they are today. I don't want to give anything away so I'll leave the description there!

The thing I love most about Jessie Burton is every novel has a few moments in it where I think, wow, how did she think of that turn of phrase. For example, a key and memorable sentence to me from The Confession was when a character describes what it is like to fall out of love, "how it feels when the love you've had for someone...leaks out of you. Like you're slowly being dripdried...". The imagery and emotion is spot on.

It's a thoroughly good read and I think this will be another huge bestseller, well deserved by @JessieBurton.

Released on the 19th September 2019.

#libraryatsevern #bookstagrammer #readersofinstagram #bookstagram #igreads #bookshelf #goodreads #netgalley #theconfession #panmacmillan #book #bookworm #bookreviewer

I requested this ARC from Netgalley because I had read the author's two previous adult novels - The Miniaturist (which I enjoyed) and The Muse (which I loved).

Like her previous novels, this is written skilfully, but in a way that seems effortless. Burton's prose is often beautiful and her observations are spot-on. Themes such as family, friendship, decisions, mistakes, consequences and responsibility are handled well, with sympathy and understanding.

The pacing is generally good, if occasionally a little slow, and the writing is complex and immersive. The tale is driven more by character than by plot (which is not to say it is lacking in plot, rather tha the characterisation is excellent). I found it took me a while to become engaged but then I realised that I had begun to care very much about what happened next for at least some of the characters. There is a dual timeline; one story is set in the 1980s and told in the third-person, and the other is contemporary and told in the first-person from Rose's perspective. This is perhaps why I identified most with Rose, even though she and I have little in common. I found Constance to be more appealing in the later timeline (and she is, really, the only major character who appears in both). For the most part, Elise irritated me - I wanted her to take control of something rather than allowing her life to be decided by the surrounding events. All of the characters are convincing - I'd have liked to know more about Matt's motivations for his later actions, and to find out more about Yola. The book delves artfully into the complexities of the decisions taken by the characters.

The event which seems to give the book its title happens relatively late in the story, and I feel that the ending felt a little rushed - it is not the book's strongest point.

I enjoyed this more than The Miniaturist, but less than The Muse - which means that for me, this author's books, in the order they were written, come in at 3*, 5* and 4* - which is a) consistently good, and b) means I will look forward to the next one!

4.5 stars.

I have only read one other book by this author, The Minituarist, and this novel in my opinion is far superior.

We meet Rose, who has always felt like there was a hole in her life where her mother should be. Raised by her dad we only know what he tells her: her mother, Elise, had an affair with author Constance Holden, and for a time they were inseparable. Then, shortly after Rose was born, Elise vanishes without a trace, leaving Rose behind with a friend. Now 34, Rose manages to get a job working with Constance, now 73, who is finally writing another novel after a thirty year absence. Rose hopes this will be the key to finding answers she desperately seeks but finds herself drawn into an unlikely friendship with Connie.

This novel alternates the time line, between 1982/3 to 2017. At first I found this jarring but once the narrative is established I soon found myself flying through this novel. Its a tale about women, what it means to be your own self, what it means to be strong, independent and finding your own voice and your own path. It's incredibly powerful and moving and the characters felt real, the circumstances relatable, the writing beautiful.

Thank you to Netgalley for an e-arc of this in exchange for an honest review.

A beautifully written, emotional story about truth and lies, motherhood and friendship and most of all, about the importance of being true to yourself. I really enjoyed the two timelines and how they reflected on each other. The characters, at first, were hard to like, but their flawed personalities quickly grew on me. By the end of the book, I felt I had been on quite an intense, emotional journey.

Jessie Burton's writing seems to be becoming more mature and more complex with every novel; I felt lukewarm about The Miniaturist but was gripped by The Muse. Her latest, The Confession, is even more compelling. The book switches between two timelines, both equally interesting: in the early 1980s, Elise Morceau, in her early twenties, falls swiftly in love with the older novelist Connie Holden after a chance meeting on Hampstead Heath, and goes with her to LA. Meanwhile, in present-day London, Elise's daughter, Rose, wants to know more about the mother she can't remember - Elise disappeared when Rose was a baby - and devises a plan to make contact with Connie after she discovers that Connie was the last person to see her mother before she went missing. Burton writes so intelligently about choosing whether or not to have a child (there's precious little fiction, especially in this mainstream literary vein, that allows women to choose to remain childless, but The Confession made me realise that we also hear little about why women actively choose to have children.) Burton's concern with the conditions under which women can make art, which preoccupied The Muse, is also an important sub-theme in this novel, and there's something of Clarissa Pinkola Estes's classic Women Who Run With the Wolves in her depiction of women who feel compelled to drop out of their everyday lives. As with the ending of The Muse, Burton gives into the temptation to spell out the themes of the novel a little too neatly in its last few pages, but this is still a smart, thought-provoking take on how women negotiate emotional ties.

I will post this review to Goodreads and to my blog closer to the publication date.

Jessie Burton is an incredible weaver of stories. The Muse author has definitely delivered on her third novel, a devastating story of love and the endless search for oneself in the past and the present.

Burton has a magical ability to inject a realness i to her characters. This is a book that you will not want to put down but also not want to end.

I absolutely loved it. Bawled my eyes out at the end.

I loved this book, and couldn’t put it down. Generation-spanning stories are my jam, and The Confession really delivered on that front. An emotional, engrossing tale about three powerful, flawed women. Really, really different to anything else Jessie Burton has written, but equally fantastic.