This was an interesting start to what I am sure is a brilliant book, however unfortunately I just couldn’t get into it, the characters to me were very flat and I couldn’t enjoy it.

The premise and that setting of avoidance was great and the descriptions of the setting were fab.

There was a time when almost everyone read novels as good as this - from authors such as E.M. Forster, John Galsworthy and H.E. Bates - now sadly with the passing of those authors and an absence of any newcomers of a similar ilk there has been a period of literary famine. Now at last Chris Davies has written a novel that evokes and rekindles the talents of Forster, Galsworthy and Bates in his own inimitable style.
Drawing on family archives and many factual sources the author writes of the end of innocence, the late Victorians and Edwardians, and the loss of a whole generation in the Great War. This is a profoundly moving novel full of characters and situations I will never forget.

At the heart of the story are three women: sisters Nell and Mary Harriette, one living life to the full and the other wishing she could, and Nell’s daughter Frances, who exchanges the unpredictability of life with her mother for the only too predictable world of her aunt back in England. The novel follows them and the people they love as each one navigates the narrow path between family expectation and private happiness. Through amazingly fluid writing and a great story line, you get engulfed in the storytelling until the end! A steady pace, nothing slow and nothing rushed. Perfect! I lost my whole day reading – just couldn't bare to put it down! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️