A really original and interesting storyline that weaves back and forth from the Second World War to the present day which explores what may happen if you make a different decision and take another path.. I found Laura a bit difficult to relate to but enjoyed Will and his love, Rosa, and the unraveling of the past events..A good read that will keep you thinking.

This was a book that was right up MU street! I loved SOOOOO much of it except the end (just an IMO here)

Honestly the dual timeline is probably one of the BEST I have read, there’s times when I’ve read things like this and not really seen the point with it but it just goes so well!

I just loved Elsa, Will and Laura so much and my heart went out to Laura and Will so much!

Parts of this really got me in the feels, very very well done!

One of the most unique books I’ve ever read. Part saga, part mystery, part science fiction, but it all blends together to form a brilliant book about the enduring quality of love. Utterly romantic and an unforgettable read.

This sweet and satisfying tale moves seamlessly between the 1940s and 2000s to explore the intertwining lives of an anxiety- ridden 29-year-old woman Laura and the 87-year-old man Will she is assessing to see if he needs to be moved into care. Will claims to have been in love with Elsa, an Austrian refugee, but his story does add up. Is it dementia, the consequence of Laura coming off her antidepressants or something else? It’s a sweeping love story and a heart-warming tale of an unusual friendship that crosses the boundaries of age, time and space.

The Frequency of Us is another amazing story by Keith Stuart. It is going to be a difficult one to review though as I could happily talk about it for ages, but I don’t want to give too much away.
Having read, and loved, A Boy Made of Blocks and Days of Wonder I was very much looking forward to reading this book. All three books are completely unique, but they all have at least one thing in common; they are so beautifully written and completely captivating.
When we first meet Laura, she isn’t in a good place, but we don’t really know why. She starts a job as a community carer and is given the task of assessing 87-year-old, Will. Will isn’t particularly welcoming, but Laura sticks with him all the same, despite not feeling overly confident in her own abilities. There is something about him she can’t quite put her finger on, and he seems to find something familiar about her too, but they had never met until now. It soon becomes apparent that there is more to Will’s story than meets the eye. Laura makes it her mission to find out the truth in the hope of bringing him some peace. His sadness, confusion, and frustration are heart-wrenching but are his memories even real or just a symptom of dementia. Laura has only days to decide on, and write, her report before social services take over his case.
What seems like a simple, but heartfelt and emotional story of an old man and his carer, who is trying her best to prove he is capable of living alone in his own home, soon becomes much, much more.
I was totally swept up in their story and their fight to find the truth before it was too late, and I was as desperate as Laura to connect all the dots and to try to understand how everything and everyone was connected. This is so intelligently written, and such a genius idea for a novel. It’s like nothing I have ever read before and I am sure it will stay with me for a long time to come.
This book is full of complex characters who all add depth to the story. There is a powerful love story at the core of this novel, but it is so much more than that. So much more than I could have ever imagined. I absolutely loved it from the first page to the last. I highly recommend!
**Many thanks to the author and publisher for my review copy via Netgalley**

I first had a digital copy of this book, then I got a chance to listen to it on audio. This is almost always welcome since it means that it can cut the line and move forward of the books I have pending to read since I can listen to it on the move and when doing my groceries. This story was narrated slowly, and although I heard it at 1.5x, I could still feel the characters' dignity.
The story does not go the way of normal historical fiction, and the element that makes it different may seem jarring for a few, especially since it is quite unexpected. I really enjoyed another of this author's books, so I was looking forward to this. There is no similarity between this work and the Boy made of blocks except for how the emotions/despair of people seeps through.
We have an unlikely pair of friends whose paths cross unexpectedly. We have Laura, a nervous wreck and Will, a grumpy old man lost in the confusion that is his life. Laura sets out trying to unravel the past but comes away with more than she bargained for. I thought parts of it could have been trimmed for better effect since Laura's research into the past seemed to take too long, given the length of the work. The past is narrated by Will Emerson as he remembers it, and it was a good way to simultaneously see the younger and the present versions of the same man, given the way that time has treated him. The explanation of the twist seemed reasonable enough, I did not expect to be convinced by it, but I was.
The lesser said about the actual plotline, the better, especially since the story is revealed to maximize any possible secrets in the narrative. Finally, I have to say I would pick up another book by the author given a chance.
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

Intriguing, sad stories of love with a hint of mystery.

I adored both of Stuart's previous two books, and was definitely going to try this based on his writing style and warm stories. This time, the concept is rather different. It's still a family-based story, with mental illness a theme, but now with both a historical angle as well as a hint at science fiction.

With two storylines, one in roughly present day England, the other a backstory around the era of World War II, it concentrates on the life of a now 87-year-old man, Will, a former wireless engineer living in Bath. Now, he's a curmudgeonly old man who could be a danger to himself and others, in a house falling down around him. With a young lady from Social Services assigned to him to assess his case. The young lady in question has issues of her own.

The second storyline has us looking back at his history, as his social worker Laura delves into his life through the fog of her depression medication, trying to ascertain the truth of his certainty - did he have a wife that disappeared with the bomb that fell on their house back in 1942?

Nobody else remembers Elsa. Will remembers their meeting, their courtship, their life together. But it all vanished when the bomb fell. And it affected his life for the next 60 years. Can Laura solve the puzzle? Is Will suffering from dementia or did something significant happen back then?

This is something a little different. It has fragments of historical fiction, romance, mystery, science fiction, and mixes in mental illness and a family story that also unravels itself to give a fuller picture of a second life ruined by pain.

Laura is emotional scarred, she's a mess. But she's someone you also want to succeed in life, to overcome the early trauma of constant low-level fear. She may not have been physically abused but her childhood nonetheless was tarnished. And the trust we might place in her as narrator is compromised by her skewed view of both the world and other people through the halo of medication. Will is similarly hard to trust as we simply can't tell what happened in his past.

I'm not much of a fan of the supernatural, but did love the backstory and Elsa and Will's courtship. The historical detail was superb, very easy to conjure up mentally. I enjoyed the radio/frequency metaphors throughout and how everything fitted together.

I thoroughly enjoyed the mystery and watching the uncovering of both the past and the present questions. It was satisfying. The urgency of the imminent threat to Will's house, falling down around him, gave a story moving with pace.

I wasn't sure at the start if I would enjoy this, with supernatural elements, but I really did. I enjoyed the detective aspect, as well as the historical story that needed delving into.

With thanks to Netgalley for providing a sample reading copy.

Thanks to NetGalley and to Little, Brown and Company UK (Clara Díaz in particular) for providing me an ARC copy of this book that I freely chose to review.
I have read and reviewed Keith Stuart’s previous two novels, both wonderful: A Boy Made of Blocks and Days of Wonder, and I was pleased to be offered the opportunity to read this one as well. Although in some ways this is a pretty different reading experience, less reassuring and more puzzling at times, I’ve enjoyed it as well.
It is difficult to talk about the plot of this novel without revealing too much of what happens, and although this is not a conventional mystery, a lot of the story hinges on what is real and what is not, on different versions of events and of people’s lives, on how the past makes us what we are, and on how a small decision can change many things and send our lives in totally different directions. The story is set in the historical city of Bath, in two different eras, in 2008 (the present, as far as the novel is concerned) and during WWII (mostly 1942). There are many themes explored in this novel: the nature of memory, depression and anxiety, PTSD, the changes in the city of Bath over the years, old-age care, war time (WWII) in the UK and the experience of German/Austrian refugees there, the development of radio technology, family relationships, psychological abuse, love in wartime... There are strange happenings in the book that at times can make us think of a paranormal element, although they can also be explained away in totally rational ways (almost), and there is also a science-fiction background (very light on the science part) that might feel almost an afterthought (but it probably is anything but).
When trying to come up with a category or definition that truly fitted my reading experience I only came up with movies and plays that popped into my mind as I read, but I wouldn’t say that is because they are closely related. In any case, here they go, in case they might give you a clue: Frequency (a movie from 2000, where radios played an important part and different generations managed to communicate), Sliding Doors, Match Point (those two about the effect a small decision can have), and J.B. Priestley’s time plays, particularly two I’ve watched: An Inspector Calls, and Time and the Conways.
Ultimately, this is a book about two people, Will (an old man when we meet him first, living alone and holding on to a love story nobody else seems to think was ever real), and Laura (a woman in her late twenties), who seemingly have nothing in common but quickly connect. Laura, who suffers from anxiety and depression as a result of years of psychological abuse from her father (we come to learn some of the reasons for his behaviour later, but that is no justification), has to visit Will for work, and trying to confirm his life story, one that doesn’t seem to match facts, gives her a reason to live. In the process of trying to learn about him, she gains in confidence, confronts some truths about her life and her family and learns to trust in herself. The connection between these two people, who never felt they quite belonged in their current lives, becomes clearer as the novel progresses.
Apart from the two main characters, who narrate the story in the first person each one in a different time frame (and Stuart is as good as ever at getting inside of the characters’ minds and making us experience both, Laura’s anxiety symptoms, her insecurity, and her dread, and Wills’ sense of wonder and excitement on meeting Elsa and falling in love with her), we also have Elsa Klein, a wonderful character, colourful, vibrant, magical, who haunts much of the novel, and whose voice we also hear, if only occasionally, and many other secondary characters (Laura’s boss, her mother, her father, Will’s neighbours and his friends from youth...) who play smaller parts but are also convincingly and realistically portrayed.
The novel flows well. The descriptions of Bath in the past and in the present don’t disrupt the narrative, giving it instead an anchor and a privileged setting that help carry the story along. The action takes place along different historical times, but these are clearly indicated in the novel and aren’t confusing to readers, and although some of the events are not easy to explain, this is not due to the way the story is told. The love story between Will and Elsa is very moving ,and I was touched by the story and on the verge of tears more than once. I highlighted so much of the novel that I’d find it difficult to choose only one or two quotes. I recommend future readers to check a sample of the book to see if it would be a good fit for their taste.
I’ve talked about mysterious goings on when referring to the plot, and there are some false endings, when you think that is it and feel disappointed (at least I did), but don’t worry, it is not. I know some readers weren’t totally convinced by the ending, and well, I’m still thinking about it (and will probably be thinking about it for a long time), but I liked it. I won’t go into suspension of disbelief, etc., etc. Yes, depending on how you look at it, it might not make sense from a conventional point of view, but that is not what this novel is about.
In sum, this is another great novel by Keith Stuart, perhaps his most ambitious to date, where he goes exploring not only historical fiction, but also speculative Physics, the nature of time and memory, multiverses, enduring love, and a world full of wonderful characters. If you need a story with a little bit of magic, imagination, a hopeful ending and a lot of heart, I recommend it.

It’s not often you find a book with a really original angle, this is a love story but fantastically inventive in it’s telling. I really enjoyed the book and the characters

Thanks for letting me review this book

Wow ... another winner from Keith Stuart. This was a book I wanted to rush through, but I also wanted to take my time and enjoy each page.
The book was totally different, with a little bit of the mystic mixed up in the story - right up my street.
I really felt for the characters and I was behind them all through the book. I loved the coming together of the different story lines and they all fit very nicely for me.
I can’t wait for whatever book this author creates next.

@currentlyreading__
Book 16 of 2021

Almost two weeks ago "The Frequency of Us" by Keith Stuart was published - a story of love and loss I was completely enthralled by. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for sending an e-copy of the book in exchange for my review. I have never read anything by the author before so came to the book completely clear of any authorial bias. What a writer! The book has a dual time frame - Bath of the Second World War and Bath in 2007. Our protagonist Laura is given a job as care-assistant for Bath City Council and is assigned 87 year old cantankerous Will Emerson, living in dilapidated Avon Lodge and very much living in the past, with dusty relics of his younger years surrounding him. Will was obsessed with radios and his love for Elsa Klein, the Jewish Austrian refugee he has loved since their meeting during WWII. The radios form a central motif, as Will warms to Laura and shows her how they work but also serve as a reminder to us, that sometimes we need to tune into others, despite how disparate their lives may be to our own. In 1942, Will's house is bombed and when he wakes, it is as if Elsa never existed. Laura is on a quest to prove people wrong - this is not a man with dementia with confabulation, it is someone longing to be reunited with the precocious and energetic Elsa. Laura becomes certain, picking up the various frequencies and vibrations, that Elsa is trying to communicate. Despite this, Laura is also suffering her own problems - anxiety, panic disorder and depression. This is a beautifully unique, historical and multi-dimensional love story. I loved the beautiful scenes of Laura and Will piecing together his history and Laura's bravery in returning to London, the city she "survived" in and not "lived" in.

I cannot forget the beautiful extended metaphor at the close of the book "Life is a radio dial; we travel along it from left to right and on the way we discover stations that we fall in love with and cherish - then we move on and lose them." This is a definite one to pick up if you enjoy a love story, anything with a paranormal element and the message that love never dies. ❤️ I will particularly enjoy hearing other opinions on this book on the BBC2 book programme 'Between the Covers' this Spring.


#bookstagram #bibliophile #bookworm #book #booknerd #bookstagrammer #kindle #instabook #reader #bookobsessed #instareads #currentlyreading #bookchat #bookish #aprilreading #books #readersofinstagram #books #keithstuart #thefrequencyofus #betweenthecovers

Will is 87 years old, living in his childhood home which is crumbling around him. Laura is sent in by a care agency to assess him and write a report for the council (for someone who works in this field I had to suspend belief a little to get on board with this). Will insists that he was married to an Austrian refugee named Elsa but something happened during the bombings in Bath and he hasn’t seen her since. Laura has to unravel fact from fiction whilst dealing with her own past at the same time.
I enjoyed this book. At times I felt that the plot was difficult to follow and I felt that the story was over with about 25% still to read. The ending tied it all together and overall I’m glad I read it

I really enjoyed it! The writer is a really talented one and the narrative was one to follow closely. I am looking forward for its sure success. This is certainly of the top books of the year. Thank you #NetGalley, the publisher and the author for letting me read this exceptional novel in exchange of my honest review.

A quirky and thoughtful story with a dual narrative structure. In Bath during World War II, a bomb falls. When wireless engineer Will returns home after waking up in hospital, however, there's no sign of Elsa, the woman he loves and lives with...

In present time, Will lives in a mouldering house, trapped by his memories. Laura is a young care worker with serious issues of her own, but she is drawn into Will's story.

Intriguing and thoughtful, this is a good book to discuss.

The book follows two timelines – firstly back during the Second World War and the romance between Will and Elsa, and then 2008, where Laura is assigned Will as a client for the care agency that she’s working for.

(This did actually make me realise that it would be difficult to write a book in the present day with people having memories of the Second World War. My Grandmother – who died at the age of 90 two years ago – was an evacuee during the war. My children have been so lucky to be able to talk to their Great Grandma about her experiences when they’ve studied evacuees at school. As the last few people of her generation pass away, so do the real life stories of the war, which has made me quite emotional.)

I enjoyed both timelines a lot – and I have to say the city of Bath was a character in the book in its own right. The descriptions of it were excellent – and it’s made me want a weekend break there (when we’re allowed again, obviously!)

The relationship between Will and Elsa was beautifully written – and I wanted to find out more about them. Equally the very different relationship between Laura and Will is also interesting, if not conventional. Laura has so much ‘stuff’ going on in her own life, and her struggles with her own mental health – that being able to focus on helping Will seems to help her too.

The comparison of young Will (radio geek, passionate about his work. madly in love with Elsa) and old Will (grumpy, rude, loner) were excellent – and as the story develops you realise why this has happened.

The book also looks at Laura’s past and her relationship with her every present Mother – and absent Father – and why this has made her the person she is today. It’s not been an easy life for Laura or Will.

The run up to the ending was really unusual – and not what I’d expected at all. I don’t even want to compare it to anything (although I have a book and a TV programme that I could easily reference!) but I think it’s better reading it without any spoilers at all.

This is a warm and hopeful novel of second chances, overcoming the past and everlasting love. Laura, a young woman suffering from anxiety and trauma after years of suffering at the hands of her unpredictable, disparaging father, takes a job as carer to an old man living alone and possibly suffering from dementia. The two form a strange understanding and she is drawn into his story, where he was living with a spirited Austrian refugee, Elsa, during World War Two, until he was injured during a bomb attack in their street. He rushes home from the hospital to find all traces of Elsa’s existence have disappeared and nobody acknowledges that she was ever part of his life. Laura finds purpose in trying to uncover what really happened all those years ago, and why she feels a uncanny connection to it. Some interesting concepts are covered here, particularly how a painful past can blight the present and future and be passed dpwn to future generations, but I felt this idea took second place to the feelgood story of love and redemption, so although I am sure it will be widely enjoyed, I found it rather unconvincing and didn’t feel much engagement with the characters.

I loved the juxtaposition of the old Will (89 years old and grumpy) with young Will (spritely, a bit nerdy and very in love) alongside the modern day Laura (clearly suffering with her mental heath). Laura is sent to be a carer for Will and the tale of his wife Elsa comes into play - was she real? where did she go? The book unfolds this story over the chapters and I couldn't put this book down until about 80% of the way through when a supernatural almost sci-fi element is introduced and it just threw me off entirely and left me thinking what is going on.
If last 20% had taken a different turn I feel this could have been a 5* read for me but the ending left me lacking.

Thank you to Netgalley, Little Brown Book Group & Keith Stuart for the advanced copy.

A strange, supernatural angle to this, although it's not completely obvious. It is clear Laura has issues in her life andhas had a breakdown of some kind. We are teased with the reasons and what happened through much of the book. She is sent as a carer to elderly Will Emerson, a cantankerous old man in a falling down house. Somehow Laura gets through to Will and tries to figure out if his life story is true or he's living in a fantasy brought on by dementia, which looks increasingly obvious as time passes. There is a naive truth to the story however, and you want Elsa to have existed - but what happened on that fateful night n 1942 when the bombs dropped on Bath, and will Laura's life be irrevocably changed too? A sweet, strange story. #netgalley #thefrequencyofus

I read Keith Stuart’s A Boy Made Of Blocks a few years ago and remember how wonderfully uplifting it was. So I was really excited to read something else by him and my God, this crazy ride of a book didn’t disappoint!

During the Nazi attack on the city of Bath in 1942, Will Emerson is a young wireless radio engineer living with the love of his life Elsa Klein, an Jewish Austrian refugee. When their home is bombed, Will wakes up to find that Elsa has gone and so has any trace of her existence. 70 years later, social worker Laura is trying to rebuild her life after a period of bad mental health and trauma. She is tasked with assessing a now 87-year-old Will to see if he should be put into residential care. His house hasn’t changed at all since the war and his ramblings about a wife who apparently never existed have been dismissed as dementia symptoms by everyone. But Laura is pretty sure that at least some of what Will is saying must be true…

Both Laura and Will could be deemed to be unreliable narrators due to how each of their mental states are commonly perceived. There were points in the story where I wasn’t sure what was true and what was a fabrication of a damaged mind but something about Stuart’s writing gave me faith that Will and Elsa’s love story had happened. I knew that both he and Laura would have a hard time convincing the world of it though, especially when the real truth came to light because it is, well, unbelievable!

Will is a cantankerous, spiky old man but Laura seems to have this incredible power to get through to him. He has been misunderstood and ignored by his neighbours and the authorities for years, so it’s not too hard to see why he is wary of Laura at first. At the very end, we learn why he seems to have this remarkable, unique connection to her but I think it would only ever have taken someone as loyal and patient as Laura to get to the truth of what has really happened.

Laura is still healing from a childhood with an alcoholic, abusive father. This is really the catalyst from her years of depression and suicidal behaviour that have made up her life so far. Her newfound responsibility of taking care of Will and the fascination and focus on finding the truth in his story gives her some distraction. There are still points where she is taken back to that dark place and I think that this is Stuart’s reminder to us that the recovery process from trauma and depression is a long, non-linear road. Just because Laura is now holding down a job and doing something productive, she is certainly not cured.

Elsa is a wonderfully intriguing character and there were parts of her story that were so heartbreaking that I began to think that she may have been someone that Will had read about rather than actually had a relationship with. Her story is truly incredible and is almost certainly reflective of that of so many European Jews during the Nazi rise to power. She escapes into art and culture, like we all do, and her dates with Will show the excitement of the beginning of a slow-burning, heartwarming romance with the potential to last forever.

The chapters that focus on returning to Avon Lodge after the bombing really capture the despair, the fear and utter devastation that normal people felt, when they discovered that their homes and loved ones had gone overnight. Bleak descriptions of decimated streets, lifeless bodies, desperate rescue attempts and livelihoods simply wiped out put me firmly in that time and place. These parts of the book were obviously incredibly well researched and very powerfully immersive.

The truth is teased out slowly in a very clever way. I suspected that something like it may have happened but I wasn’t sure until it was finally revealed. It sees a merging of historical fiction with ideas that are now much more commonplace in general conversation. There are some big philosophical and scientific theories to ponder and I had so much fun thinking about them.

The Frequency Of Us is an incredibly unique, emotionally-charged tale featuring a love story that stretches decades and a mystery that doesn’t appear to add up unless you look outside of what you consider to be possible. It’s an epic story written in beautiful thought-provoking prose that I could read forever. Keith Stuart’s writing style reminds me of Matt Haig’s -thoughtful, profound and life-affirming. Simple but wonderfully wise.

heart-warming and tender, lovely to read, an exploration of lost loves and heartbreak in a wartime setting.