In 30 words or less, tell us what is great about a book you are reading at the moment. The best critique will be printed in the February issue of The Weekly and the writer will win The AWW Cooking School cookbook, valued at $74.95.
THE DISTANT HOURS By Kate Morton, Allen & Unwin, $39.99.
“IT STARTED WITH a letter. A letter that had been lost a long time, waiting out half a century … in a forgotten postal bag in the dim attic of a nondescript house in Bermondsey. I think about it sometimes, that mailbag; of the hundreds of love letters, grocery bills, birthday cards, notes from children to their parents, that lay together, swelling and sighing as their thwarted messages whispered in the dark.”
So begins The Distant Hours, the latest novel by Kate Morton, following the runaway success of The Shifting Fog and The Forgotten Garden. Kate will not disappoint her legion of fans. In her signature style, this novel moves seamlessly from the 1990s to the grim wartime years of the 1940s, as our heroine unravels a decades-old mystery that has engulfed lives and left people changed forever. What is intriguing is how a woman who grew up at Tamborine Mountain, Queensland, attending a tiny country school, can create such vivid creations about events half a world away. Her secret is simple: old-fashioned groundwork and imagination.
“There was a lot of research to do, the sort done with books at my desk in my little office … plus a climb up Sissinghurst Tower [in Kent, England], guided tours of Blitz-torn London and an abandoned Underground station … I shiver just thinking about it!”
Also telling is her own admission that she spent much of her childhood inventing and playing games of make-believe with her sisters, and her adoration of author Enid Blyton.
Kate effortlessly paints in the minute detail of a nation at war: London’s children facing tearful farewells from their parents and a rushed evacuation to the countryside, clutching gas masks and borrowed suitcases.
There, a 13-year-old girl is chosen to live at Milderhurst Castle, where a new world opens up for the teenager as she discovers the joys of books and fantasy and writing, but she is also dragged into the adult world of love affairs gone awry and dangerous secrets.
Fifty years later, that girl’s daughter, Edie, is drawn to the castle and begins to unravel her mother’s past.
In 30 words or less, tell us what is great about a book you are reading at the moment. The best critique will be printed in the February issue of The Weekly and the writer will win The AWW Cooking School cookbook, valued at $74.95.
Please ensure you leave an email address you can be contacted on in order to be eligible for the prize.
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