The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley is an exciting, engaging, sometimes confusing time-bending book, filled with adventure, suspense and naval battles.

We follow Joe Tournier in 1898 as he arrives in London on a train from Glasgow. Joe is confused because everything is both familiar and wrong. He can't remember anything about his life prior to that point and everyone (including himself) is speaking French. The rest of the book explores the reasons for Joe's amnesia and helps him find out and connect with the people who are important to him.

A weird and compelling book, thoroughly recommended.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

This is a wonderful time-bending tale that twists the historical events around the Napoleonic War. The story is incredibly twisty and engrossing and is an extremely original take on the time-travel genre. A fantastic adventure with unforgettable characters. I absolutely loved it!

Have you ever read a book, enjoyed it, but had little to no idea what was actually happening? That's how I feel about The Kingdoms. I loved the characters, the authors writing style and the general mystery, but came out of it at the end wondering what exactly it was I had just read. I'm going to apologise now because this review might end up a little all over the place with me trying to explain my feelings without giving away major spoilers.

The Kingdoms follows Joe Tournier after he 'wakes up' in London with no real knowledge of who he is, how he got there and where exactly there is. He is quickly picked up by his Master who informs Joe he is a slave, has been since he was a child. Joe has no recollection of this, nor of the wife that the Master insists he has. According to the doctors Joe is suffering from a kind of paramnesia that is selectively affecting people around the country. Then one day a postcard appears with a picture of a lighthouse signed M. The arrival of the postcard sets into motion a chain of events that will see Joe travel the length of the country, and even to a different Britain, one before the French invaded where a mysterious British ship and it's crew were captured for information. Joe has the potential to change the world, if he can just remember.

The Kingdoms is a heavily character driven story of which Joe is at the forefront. He never really feel like he fits into his life in French occupied London, he doesn't have memories of his wife, let alone feelings, but the one thing he does remember is a blurry visage of a man on a beach, and a vision of an England that speaks English instead of French. You can't help but feel for Joe throughout the story, especially when he finds people who seem to know the truth of him but are unwilling to give up the knowledge. His story is one of love as well as immeasurable loss, and I wont lie in saying it had me in an overly emotional state.

We're also introduced to a wide cast of side characters from Joe's supposed wife to Kite, the Captain of the boat Joe finds himself on, but they're all incredibly hard to talk about without giving away spoilers for the plot. Suffice to say they all have a major part to play in the telling of Joe's story, as well as the furthering of the plot. Were never quite sure who we can trust, especially given Joe is the King of unreliable narrators, but we know that some of them know more about Joe's story than they are letting on, even if we aren't sure of the reasons.

Not only told from different perspectives, but different time periods and even different historical timelines, which got a little confusing at first. I buddy read this with Susan and it took her sending me multiple clips from Avengers movies before I got my head round certain aspects of the story and timelines. You should definitely pay attention to the chapter headers, as these mention the time period the chapter is from which definitely helped me. But even within that we have overlapping timelines, history literally being changed before our eyes, and though I managed to get my head round a lot of the changes, it was the ending that really threw me for a loop and left me with a lot of unanswered questions.

Now, I'm normally a fan of open ended books, but this was a little too open ended for my liking. I felt like the main mystery of the book just never got explained, and I really struggled to understand the last few chapters and how they fit into the previous 'ripple effect' style timeline changes. I will admit that this might be a me issue and not the book, there seem to be a lot of people who loved this story, ending and all. I just would have loved an explanation for Joe's paramnesia, as well as a better understanding of who exactly it was happening too and why.

Pulley definitely pulls no punches with her storytelling. I went through a rigmarole of emotions whilst reading The Kingdoms, and there were definitely a few moments that had me shouting WTF. Her characters are incredibly complicated, but I can guarantee you will love them... even the more morally grey ones. Pulley's writing style is beautiful and emotive and certainly adds a flow to a story that could have been choppy if written differently. I did enjoy this book, but there are certain sticking points for me that just meant I didn't love it, or understand it as much as I would have liked.

Natasha Pulley has a lovely way with words where she can create prose that is so quietly magical. It is all the more magical for being so soft and subtle, and just like The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, the only other Pulley novel I have read, The Kingdoms is enchanting. I finished it nearly a week ago and I find myself sometimes thinking about the characters, thinking about what would happen after the last page and if they’re okay. That’s my favourite feeling to have after finishing a book, that constant wondering about people who you read about for so many pages and are so dear to you they feel real.

The Kingdoms main strength is with its characters. Joe is our main character, introduced to us after exiting a train without knowing who or where he is, the latest victim of a type of amnesia that has been affecting people around the same time. Joe’s story is focused on finding his past, particularly in trying to remember people who may have once loved him. A big theme of the novel is love, and though it is far from being classed as a Romance, love plays such an important role in the story. The people Joe grows to love and the people he used to love before he forgot them are both important facets of the story, and the times where the lines blur and Joe feels guilty or heartbroken for having loved are achingly sad. It’s especially lovely to be able to read a slowburn romance within such an epic story between two men, the yearning and aching nature of love pairing perfectly with the large-scale problem of being lost in time.

Although love is such a prominent thread throughout The Kingdoms, the main plot is the mystery about what happened to Joe. After a domino effect of choices, Joe finds himself alone at a remote lighthouse where he seems to have travelled back in time. Naturally, this creates a whole new set of problems including history changing before his eyes and the agony of not knowing if his actions are unintentionally erasing the things that are important to him in the future. With pirates, tortoises, naval battles and murder, it is an incredibly entertaining read without ever losing that focus on quiet magic and the importance of love.

The complicated nature of the story is handled really well, and though I had to do a little extra googling about the nineteenth century, the story is presented clearly while still maintaining a lavish abundance of plot and intriguing exploration of changing history. Timelines overlap and are erased, dissolving before our eyes and being built up from the smallest action creating a ripple effect. I found it both epic in scale and understandable, and Pulley did an incredible job of weaving both sides of the time travel together.

Joe’s whole journey revolves around a postcard that simply says ‘come home if you remember’, and as the story explores where his home is and who could have sent him this postcard from the past, I found it both beautiful and thrilling. At the end of the day, everything is about love and finding home.

Thank you to Net Galley for providing this ARC!

I enjoyed this story even if I was slightly confused, but it was a pleasant type of confusion that is a hallmark of Natasha Pulley's strange, quiet, and time-bending stories. The Kingdoms follows Joe Tournier, who finds himself with no memories, standing on a train platform in French-occupied London, in a world and a time this is both familiar and alien. Struggling with a life he doesn't recognise, he receives a postcard that simply says "Come home, if you remember”, and sets off to find out the truth of who he is and what happened to him. What follows is an unravelling of past and future, tangled together with memories of people and love that echo across time.

The writing is eloquent and softly emotive, and for all the ways that the timeline and plot is puzzling, it is also deeply intriguing. There's beautiful descriptions of Scotland, and gorgeous aesthetics of seafaring and lighthouses. The characters - especially Joe and Kite - are written in this very careful, precise manner, revealed slowly through quiet moments and subtle observation. Kite is very interesting, likeable yet complicated, although some more questionable parts of his character were a little too glossed over. The gay yearning is PERFECTION, full of tenderness and frustration, and I cried for basically the entire last chapter. The story jumps around a lot, which gets a bit difficult to follow in the middle, but ultimately provides these moments of heartbreaking realization that amplify the stakes and the emotions.

It's a weird, confusing, and slow-build story that I know won't be to everyone's taste, but if you liked Pulley's previous novels, then this has a similar aesthetic, full of fluid timelines, carefully crafted characters and that a strange kind of almost-magic. The themes of time and history that are so prevalent in the Watchmaker of Filigree Street and the Bedlam Stacks are explored again in The Kingdoms in a way that is new and ambitious but still familiar.

Honestly, some of the history stuff went a bit over my head, and the constant movements between years and ships and characters got a bit too much in the middle section, but it's worth it. However, I'm not totally sure that having British people as slaves in the alterative timeline was an appropriate thing to include, given Britain's involvement in the actual history of slavery, and I think this could have been taken out without really affecting the plot too much.

Rating - 4.5 Many thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for the eARC.

I have been an enormous fan of Natasha Pulley's work since I read The Watchmaker of Filigree Street several years ago and so I was overjoyed to receive the eARC of her new book.

It follows the story of Joe Tournier, who finds himself stepping off a train in 19th Century France with absolutely no idea who he is, or how he got there. His only clue is a postcard of an old Scottish lighthouse, written by the mysterious M, the only person who might be able to help Joe find himself again. Accompanying Joe on his journey through time was wonderful, although the eARC had some formatting errors which were a bit distracting at times.

As with The Watchmaker, this was a beautiful story, exceptionally written with diverse characters that you take straight into your heart. It is not a fast-paced book, but I found the slow unveiling of the story to be perfectly suited to the subject matter. I am not usually a fan of books that include time travel, but this is definitely an exception. There are no other characters I would rather travel through time with.

This is the first book I read by Natasha Pulley and I wanted to read it because I found the blurb fascinating.
I wasn't disappointed as this is a fascinating story that mixes genres and makes you think.
There's plenty of things I loved and the alternate history side was excellent as it describes a UK which is a French colony.
The world building is excellent, the characters are fleshed out and the complex plot flows and never drags.
It was an excellent read and I found it gripping, entertaining and thought provoking.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

The Kingdoms is a genre-bending, time-twisting alternative history fantasy that asks whether it's worth changing the past to save the future, even if it costs you everyone you've ever loved set at both the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It's 1898 and Joe Tournier has a bad case of amnesia; he appears to remember his name but nothing else of value. His first memory is of stepping off a train in Londres in the nineteenth-century French colony of England having travelled there from Glasgow. He learns that the former British capital has been a colony of the French Republic ever since they won the Napoleonic Wars ninety years ago. He doesn't recognise his surroundings and can remember nothing about his life before the moment he is presently in. A doctor diagnoses him with ”silent epilepsy” a disease characterised by paramnesia, amnesia and visions. Paramnesia is described as ”the blurring of something imaginary and something real”, but Joe isn't the only one in the city with the same strange afflictions. Despite the illness, Joe is soon returned to his French master—most English citizens have been enslaved under the reign of Napoleon IV—and to his wife, Alice, none of whom he remembers; in fact, Joe believes his wife to be called Madeline and has visions of her being a completely different person from the reality. Then one day a clue to Joe’s identity arrives in the post about a month after he arrives in Londres; a postcard mailed a century ago in 1805 and featuring the image of a Scottish lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides. But this lighthouse has only recently been built so how is that possible? And why has it taken so long for the mail to reach its final destination?

Written in illegal English-instead of French-the postcard is signed only with the letter "M," but Joe is certain whoever wrote it knows him far better than he currently knows himself, and he's determined to find the writer and get answers about his identity and past in the process. The search for M, though, will drive Joe from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland where north of Glasgow he travels through a time portal that transports him back to the era of the (Napoleonic) War and victory could be anyones. At the lighthouse, he meets Missouri Kite, a Royal Navy officer from 1807 who’s manning the lost empire’s battleships and his sister and the ship’s surgeon, Agatha Castlereagh, who hope to use technology and information from the future to change the outcome of the war. Can Joe help the British to win against the French and change the course of history? This is a compelling, utterly captivating and richly atmospheric novel combining steampunk, speculative fiction, queer romance and history in a highly original tale. Peopled with a small but complex, beautifully multi-layered cast of characters, we journey with Joe as he attempts to alter history whilst maintaining his connection to his young daughter who is still in the 1900s. Not only does it span a century but it also crosses Europe and has a compušlsive and thoroughly enthralling mystery at its heart. It's cleverly woven, emotionally raw and fraught with tension with a palpable level of suspense and this never dissipates. It's action-packed, rich in detail and concerns itself primarily with the ephemerality of both memory and love. Pulley’s finest work to date. Highly recommended.

So, I have to admit that when I started reading this book I was so confused. But I think that’s more of a reflection of my concentration and mental state this month. I found when I left it too long between readings I lost the books train of thought. Luckily I started reading in depth the last 3 days and really got into it.

“Come home, if you remember”
Joe, pulling into London King Cross, suddenly has no idea who he is or where he’s just come from. London is french occupied Londres now and although it all seems familiar, he remembers another life, a life that wasn’t like this. What if France hadn’t won the Battle of Trafalgar?

This is a slow burner with a lot of facts. The last third of the book really gathers momentum and after the world building I really wanted to see how it would end for these characters. Love, memories and the sailing seas - this was a really enjoyable read.

Thank you to #netgalley for this e-ARC. #TheKingdoms #NatashaPulley

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

Thanks to Bloomsbury for a review copy.

Natasha Pulley has an amazing talent for weaving the most complex of tales using simple language. Here we meet Joe, an amnesiac who arrives at a station in London, with no idea how he got there. As we follow his story the world in which he finds himself becomes increasingly complex thanks to a pair of pillars in the North Sea which connect two different time periods.

Joe is from the later of the two time periods, the end of the nineteenth century, whereas the other zone is about a hundred years earlier. This is one of those books which just seems to lead the reader effortlessly through the narrative whilst the world it describes becomes increasingly disconnected as time lines are altered – after all, the past affects the future so what happens in the earlier zone has consequences in the later one and whole futures can be wiped out as history changes.

This is not however, primarily a science fiction book. It is the story of one man, trying to understand what is happening to him and then trying to survive and protect his family in a world with which he is wholly unfamiliar.

My only criticisms were that I felt the ‘bromance’ between Joe and Missouri was overly laboured (in a similar way to the central relationship in ‘The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.’) It seemed to me that the reader would understand the subtext without having it spelt out over and over again in the story. Though this did not detract from my enjoyment it did get tedious as the book went on.

More seriously I really found myself struggling with a scene of animal cruelty quite early on in the story. Whilst the narrative point which the author was making was clear I felt that there were many other ways in which the result could have been achieved without involving animals at all. The cold and dispassionate violence displayed by the central characters, whom, up until then, I was starting to like, was heart breaking. I almost gave up on the book at this point but forced myself to continue after a couple of days break in the hope that this section would be an isolated example and that things would improve which, thankfully, they did. If I could pop back in time like the characters in this story I would certainly try and persuade the author to rewrite this section in a different way – sadly as I live in the real world and the time lines are fixed I think this is unlikely!

This aside I enjoyed the tale immensely and had no idea how it would all be pulled together at the end. The conclusion was however, wholly satisfactory and neatly wrapped up all the loose ends, including the motivations on one character whose actions had been a mystery almost until the last chapter.

Readers who enjoyed ‘The Watchmaker of Filligree Street’ will undoubtedly enjoy this even though it is a much darker novel than the earlier work. Those who have not read anything by Natasha Pulley before will find an entertaining story written in clear prose which hides deep and complex worldbuilding behind its apparent simplicity.

I've said at some point before, and I will say it again -- I will have no clue about what sliver of history Natasha Pulley will pick up to weave a book about next, and I will pick it up, and enjoy it tremednously. So far, this rule has worked for me 10/10 :D A reader who has loved her previous books would recognize certain themes that made the writing stand out -- the tender, wistful loners crossing paths and irrevocably changing those paths, the weight of lost futures, the resonance of the moment of overlap, playing fast and loose with the concept of linearity of time, a soft touch alt history -- and yet again Natasha Pulley combines these things into a vivid, immersive tale that had me sitting at the edge of my seat. It is another tenderest, most fragile love story at the very core of it, wrapped in a very illustrative meditation on colonialism, privilege and hm, butterfly effect, i suppose. It's also more violent and messy than both Watchmaker and Bedlam, which was novel, i felt, but cast the characters in such chiaroscuro light that it kept the tension high until the very last page. and honestly, i am really compelled to turn back to page one and start reading it again.

many thanks to #NetGalley for the copy of #TheKingdoms.

DRC provided by Bloomsbury Publishing via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Representation: bisexual protagonist, gay deuteragonist with hearing loss, Jamaican tertiary character, Chinese tertiary character.

Content Warning: slavery, violence (graphic), torture, child murder, death (graphic), child endangerment, emotional abuse, animal torture and killing.

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley is a phenomenal historical novel, a breath-taking uchronic story about finding the way back home.

When Joe steps off the train at the Gare du Roi station in Londres, he is feeling disoriented and is finding hard to remember most of his life. A gentle stranger brings him to the hospital where he is diagnosed with epilepsy and after a week in an asylum his family finds him. One day, a post-person delivers him a postcard from almost a century before with a Scottish lighthouse on the front and three short sentences in English on the back, but no signature except for an initial. Two years have passed, Joe has started working as a welder, but he still cannot avoid to feel as if something is missing, or better someone. When the lighthouse keepers from the same Scottish lighthouse disappear, Joe volunteers to go. This decision will bring him a step closer to discover what and who is missing from his life.

I loved it so much and now I do not know how to express that, as always! I loved everything about it: the several settings (I have a soft spot for Scotland though), the characters (red-haired boys who had difficult upbringings are also a weakness of mine) and the overall intricate plot. I urge everyone to read this book!

It is my first time reading one of Pulley’s works and it seems I could have not chosen one better than this. I was so captivated by the novel that even when I was not reading it, I still was thinking about it and what would happen next. I am really looking forward to reading something else from Natasha Pulley.

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley was full of emotions. It is set in the early 19th century and the writing was superb. The characters were fully formed with a great plot and storyline that will draw you into the pages. The story follows Joe who wakes up with no memories of who he is. This historical fantasy book will take you on a journey primarily told from Joe's perspective as he tries to figure out who he is and what has happened to the world. I really enjoyed this book and I know I'll be adding the paperback to my book collection.

I’m absolutely in awe of Natasha Pulley. Whatever she puts her hand to, it’s brilliant! The Kingdoms is a stand-alone novel mainly set in an alternative UK in early 19th c and 1900, with many twists and turns and highly surprising flights of fancy. As always, I am under the spell of this excellent author and completely buy everything she comes up with, however far fetched. Her unique ability to write complex, flawed, sympathetic and highly likeable characters is unrivalled, and this type of character comes back in every book she writes including this one. Her plotting and pacing is flawless, and with just enough tugs on the heartstrings the reader keeps racing along to figure out what is behind the oddities and peculiarities of both characters and narrative.

Apart from all of the above, the fact that the book is partly set in a lighthouse off the Outer Hebrides where three lighthouse keepers have gone missing and a mysterious, old postcard sets off a thrilling chain of events, is just perfect, I couldn’t think of a more enticing hook for me as a reader!

Yes, it is a long read, but as always, completely worth it. I read it in two sittings, you will too!

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for giving me an e ARC in exchange for an honest review. I’ve already ordered a physical copy too, as with all my favourite books.

People generally agree that it’s harder to review books you’ve enjoyed; that it’s harder to find the words to describe all the ways in which you loved a book, than it is to explain why you hated it. That statement, for me, has never been more true than right now.

I’ve read The Kingdoms six months ago, and I actually haven’t stopped thinking about it since. And yet, I still have no idea what to say about it. It’s one of those books that shattered my heart into pieces, but I’m staring at this mostly empty file & can’t string together two sentences to explain how.

If you’ve ever read a book by Natasha Pulley, you probably already know that there’s this undercurrent of magic to her writing. And I don’t mean magic in a literal sense, although a lot of her books actually do have some magical elements to them. I mean the way she weaves her stories is magic.

There’s always some big plot going on (and in most cases you could call it a mystery), but even then the books actually focus on the romance. Make no mistakes, though, Pulley does not write romance books: she writes books about love, which is to say the books only happen because the characters love each other so much. It’s visible in The Bedlam Stacks, it’s visible especially in The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, and it’s visible in The Kingdoms.

The book follows a man named Joe who wakes up without his memories, without any idea who he is or where he is, or how he got there. It’s a weird type of amnesia, and we’re told it’s actually just a typical illness of his time and he has to live with it now. As one can imagine, basically the whole story is about Joe trying to find out his past, to learn who are the people that he loves.

It’s a time travel book and it’s a mystery, and it’s literally about changing history. There are giant ships fighting, there are guns, there is so much violence & blood in that book. It could probably not be more eventful. And yet at its very core, The Kingdoms is about love.

Joe finds this postcard that says “Come home, if you remember” and it might be one of the most beautiful quotes I will ever read in a book. Just this idea that love, and specifically gay love, can be stronger than literal lows of times and physics. That you can change the world to find the one man who’s your soulmate. That idea is frankly just groundbreaking.

The thing about The Kingdoms – and this is actually true for all of Pulley’s books – is that despite everything that happens, it’s still a very slow book. Not in the sense that the pacing is bad, but just that Pulley understands the importance of why things happen, why the characters do & say the things they do. And it’s almost as if she somehow slows down the book to let you fully experience all those emotions. Like I said, it’s magic.

I’m confident that this is actually the best of Pulley’s books. If you’ve read her previous ones, you can clearly see the development of her style, the improvement over the years. With all the time travel and all the shifting of timelines, the changing of facts & history, it’s such a rich and complicated story. But most importantly it makes you believe in love and soulmates.

One of the best things about signing up to a NetGalley account is knowing you have a better than even chance of coming across a book that, while it is yet to be published, you can read it before most other people, and then tell the world how great it is, knowing somehow you’ve done your part to boost its success in the eyes of its authors, publishers, and future readers. All this to say, I’ve just finished reading The Kingdoms by British writer Natasha Pulley and you should at this very moment stop what you’re doing and order it from whatever online service works for you. This book is a heart-breaking but life-affirming masterpiece, all wrapped up in a plot that is complex and poignant.

The Kingdoms is initially set in the year 1898, where Natasha Pulley imagines an alternate history in which England lost the Battle of Trafalgar to France, resulting in the French invading London and installing itself as the ruling power and households now have English people as slaves. There is resistance from Scotland, where a group known as the Saints fight back when and where they can. Joe Tournier steps off a train in London having travelled from Edinburgh and finds that his hold on reality is vanishing rapidly. An enforced stay at a psychiatric hospital reveals he suffers from a type of amnesia brought on by epileptic episodes. Eventually he is identified and returned to a family that has enslaved him. He has a wife he doesn’t recognise and life he’s not familiar with, but he gets by because it’s what’s expected of him. His world is further turned upside down when he receives a postcard from someone called ‘M’, dated nearly 100 years in the past. Through a series of events and choices, Joe makes his way to Edinburgh, to the lighthouse pictured on the postcard, and soon he’s in another time and place.

Joe is the character through which we experience this new world, but he’s not the only person we connect to. Missouri Kite is a Spanish pirate who has joined the English resistance and using the portal near the lighthouse though which ships can travel from one time to another, he kidnaps Joe hoping to use the man’s knowledge of future technology to reshape the past and restore balance and history. But with every action in the past, the future itself becomes uncertain. Joe is afraid that if he helps Missouri and his sister Agatha then he will lose his own place in time and his daughter may very well fade into non-existence. But he feels a profound connection to the Spaniard, and there’s almost a symbiotic relationship between the two. There is more going on between then than meets the eye.

Two things must be real for me to enjoy a book, particularly one from the genre of speculative fiction and fantasy. The world-building while complex must ring true, and the characters have to jump out of the page and hold you until their story is done, leaving you to pick up the pieces of your life when the book is finished. I read the last two or three chapters of The Kingdoms twice, not because I needed to fully understand what was happening to the world, but because I wanted to feel my feelings again. The ending is beautiful. If I say anything more, I could end up spoiling the book. If you have read The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, then you’ll know what to expect from The Kingdoms. I haven’t, but now I want to.

The Kingdoms is historical speculative fiction at its finest. I fell in love with Joe and Missouri. I sympathised and empathised with their plights. My heart broke more than once for Agatha. The battle scenes are butal and history, whichever one it ends up being, never felt more vibrant and fluid. I thank NetGalley and the book’s publishers for providing me with an advance copy in exchange for an honest review. I also wish to thank Natasha Pulley for writing such a beautiful and thrilling novel. I will look out for more of her work in the future.

This is my very first Natasha Pulley and I honestly didn’t know what to expect. I’ve only ever heard really good things about The Watchmaker of Filigree Street so I was super curious about The Kingdoms.

The Kingdoms is a very clever and new take on time travel and I can only applaud Pulley for coming up with such a story and managing to make it come alive on paper. Her writing is magnificent and the reason why, I think, I was so enthralled by the plot. I’m not gonna lie, I was very lost and confused for probably the first 30% but got into it after that. The best part of it all, for me, was definitely the ending. I was afraid to be left with a very bittersweet ending but that didn’t happen and I’m very glad!

I purposefully don’t go into details about this book because I think it’s best, for everyone, to discover The Kingdoms, its story and characters, for themselves.

Finally, I do want to say that although I did enjoy it, The Kingdoms is not a book for me. I can recognise its genius and wonderful writing, characters and plot, but I’m not one for historical fiction and this, although it is very fantasy-ish, is historical fiction (it takes place in the 19th century). I just couldn’t get attached to any of it, it was good, but in a very detached kind of way. I do think a lot of people will enjoy this book though so I would still recommend it!

THE KINGDOMS is a historical fantasy set in an alternate universe of time slips that have seen the French win the Napoleonic wars.

It is primarily told following Joe's perspective as he discovers he knows nothing of his life, but has all the skills he would have picked up over the course of it (languages etc). There is this deep, unsettling feeling from the start, as soon as the reader is introduced to a London that is not the London we all know. The slippery quality of it all being both different but familiar at the same time is the perfect way to slide into a mystery full of timeslips that make the world a terrifying parallel to our own.

The mystery of who Joe is and what's happened to the world is really good, slowly unfurled across the book. Characters evade answering questions, arguing over whether to tell him or not. Events niggle and the pieces slowly come together until the most innocuous thing is the final grain on the scales to inform the readers of what's happened. The ending also has the same disconcerting feel of all being just slightly too wrong (except you know why now), which was a nice thematic wrap up, but also kept the tone of the book the same throughout.

Alongside Joe's story are a series of chapters and scenes from the past - not exactly in chronological order, which was a little hard to keep straight at times. These occasional chapters (from two POVs) reveal the events that lead to the world not being the one we know, and were a really cool exploring of a "what if" that leads to France winning at Trafalgar.

Kite is probably the most complex character of the book. It's so hard to work out who he is and if he can be trusted. Some of his actions are horrible, but he's also deeply compassionate and dedicated. Even by the end, when his "character archetype" is revealed, I still wasn't sure what to make of him, as there was no attempt to explain away the more uncomfortable of his actions.

I was so very happy to get an advance review copy from NetGalley, having loved Pulley's previous novels (The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, The Bedlam Stacks, and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow). I am happy to report that The Kingdoms (UK publication date 27 MAY 2021) is an absolute delight, the kind of book that I race through, immediately read again, and mourn for days because it's over.

🗹 identity porn
🗹 diversity
🗹 ambiguous moral choices
🗹 spectacular weather
🗹 historical conundrums
🗹 true love
🗹 london
☒ explaining everything

... I have now read this for the third time, to refresh my memory for this review, and it's still very. very good. I think, too, that it's probably Pulley's most accessible novel to date.

1898: Joe Tournier arrives in London Londres with no luggage and no memory. Nothing about the life that he apparently fits into -- a slave, with a much younger wife and a kind master -- feels at all familiar. He has a vague memory of a woman named Madeline, small and dark and wearing green: wife? sister? When he receives a postcard of a lighthouse, with the message "Dearest Joe, come home if you remember. --M", he's sure that it was sent by Madeline. But the lighthouse on the postcard has only recently been built, and the postcard was sent 93 years ago ...

Joe's quest to recover his identity takes him from Londres to Pont du Cam to the Outer Hebrides to beseiged Edinburgh; from 1898 to 1807 to 1797; from ballrooms and wardrooms to an abandoned lighthouse, and to Newgate. And, though the narrative focusses on Joe, other characters' voices recur: a Spanish naval officer turned pirate captain, his sister the ship's surgeon, and the elusive Madeline.

This is, in part, an alternate history. It's the perennial time-travel conundrum: can history be changed? In this case, yes, and that part of the plot hinges on a sketched map of the London Underground and a telegraph machine created too early. (There's also an experiment involving tortoises.) But what makes The Kingdoms so compelling is the shifting relationships between Joe, Kite and Agatha. Agatha is monstrous, and has crafted a monster: Kite is a study in a warped kind of toxic masculinity, both fragile and brutal. They both know more about Joe than they're prepared to tell, and they will go to atrocious lengths to preserve his ignorance. But he can't stay ignorant for ever, and even though he may not be able to remember anything about his life before arriving at the Gare du Roi, his subconscious, or his heart, or history itself still resonates.

I'm intrigued, and still a little perplexed, about what does and doesn't feel familiar to Joe: what he remembers, and what he recognises with hindsight. He's lost so much -- lost so many people who mattered -- and some of those memories are weightier than others. And he is inexorably drawn to Kite, despite the threats of violence, despite Kite's obvious insanity.

So much rawness and vulnerability in the dialogue of this novel, and so many harrowing scenes. (Pulley's description of sweeping the deck after a battle: 'Sailors were going over the deck with wide brooms, pushing all the pieces of people overboard and leaving red comb patterns behind -- it was the brooms that hissed.'[2798]. At least as vivid as anything in Patrick O'Brian.) And there is a lot of sudden, casual violence: because much of the novel is set during wartime, and pragmatism is the order of the day.

I would love to read a novel by Natasha Pulley in which there is a likeable, sympathetic female protagonist. There are plenty of excellent women in The Kingdoms, but: Agatha. And yet, when her backstory was revealed, her motives were thoroughly comprehensible, and I pitied her.

And now I have a book hangover again -- that feeling where you don't want to read anything else, but only to fall back into what you've just read ...

I love Pulley’s books. I’ve read them all. Her style of writing effortless weaves magic and the fantastical into something quite believable. She gets you comfy in her prose, and then introduces the absurd which your brain welcomes in like a hearty pub landlord on a winter evening.

This book is about Joe, he is introduced to us knowing about as much about himself as we know; the contents of his pockets, the lining of his jacket and a sudden confusion of a very imperial french London. That knocks you for six and that’s just page one.

The story develops and we learn more of this strange parallel world as he becomes accustomed to it. It doesn’t sit right for the protagonist and nor does it for I, the reader. We look for answers in the familiar, the reliable north of Scotland where the British resistance reside. Alone, on a remote lighthouse, which seems to exist in its own timeline & accepted as such by the locals. When Joe is taken quite against his will, to help a cause which has little merit in his own time, he focuses on his own questions to discover the mysteries of his own times.

An excellent story! Drama, mystery, suspense & romance. A must read. A favourite you’ll want to read again, to see anew the clues you missed first time around. Bravo Pulley!