A Heart Bent Out of Shape - Emylia Hall

I thought The Book of Summers was a beautifully written debut novel by a gifted new writer, and this captivating second novel by Emylia Hall confirms that talent.

Hadley Dunn is studying English at University, her life quiet and contented, when she discovers there is the opportunity to spend a year abroad in Lausanne, Switzerland. She’s still living happily at home, yet, realising this would be a year of freedom and opportunity for her, she grasps it. There she becomes firm friends with Kristina, an enigmatic Danish student. However, one snowy evening there is tragedy. Hadley turns in her anguish to Joel, her American Literature professor, with whom she feels a connection and a shared passion for Hemingway. As they join forces to unravel the mystery of what happened, their relationship looks set to develop beyond the bounds of friendship.

Emylia Hall writes beautiful prose and through her compelling narrative she captures that sense of curiosity and excitement experienced in spending a year overseas when you are young and eager, and the world feels so ripe for discovery and promises new experiences.

The beautiful, enchanting setting of Lausanne is vividly evoked; the lake, the mountains, the people were all conjured up as I read, and the place holds a charismatic presence over the tale.

I had a year abroad myself and I think the author captures this experience wonderfully. I believed in Hadley’s world utterly and felt her sheer delight and her terrible sadness. I was drawn into the characters’ lives, from handsome, damaged Joel, to wise old Hugo.

This is a poignant coming-of-age story of first love, desire, friendship, tragedy, grief and self-discovery in a stunning location.

Published by Headline - 12th September 2013

Originally reviewed for We Love This Book; thanks to them and to the publisher for the chance to read a proof copy of this novel in advance of publication. 

You can follow the author on twitter @EmyliaHall and visit her website here.

The Book of Summers - Emylia Hall

'I realized then that I'd tried so hard to forget the big things, that all the little things had gone too.'

Debut novelist Emylia Hall has taken inspiration from family holidays to rural Hungary during her childhood and woven these memories with her own imaginings to create a truly beautiful, heartfelt book.

In the novel, we meet Beth Lowe in the present day, living in London and working in an art gallery. Her father has come to visit her, and has brought with him a package for Beth that has been delivered to her back home in Devon. On opening it, and unwrapping The Book of Summers, she opens up the door to all the days of her past that she had buried away; 'As the years passed, and I strengthened my resolve, my childhood fell to time. And I drew a lid on it, as one might the contents of an old chest, pushed to the corner of an attic.' Through the photographs in the book that her mother Marika has collated, and which Beth now holds in her hands, she is drawn back once more to the memories of those summers she spent in Hungary as she grew from a girl to a young woman. 

We journey back in time with her through the recollections in her mind's eye, as she travels to Hungary with her parents for the first time; the Berlin Wall has fallen and her mother desires to see her native land once again. When they return home to Harkham, Devon, it is without Marika. And so Beth's time spent in Hungary begins. 

The author has captured the excitement and discovery first of childhood, where there is little fear and everything is there to be experienced, and then of adolesence, and the first feelings of love. The summers that Beth, then Erzsi, spent in Hungary with Marika, at Villa Serena, the house she shared with an artist. She has captured equally well the feelings of someone harbouring pain in their past; somewhere they can't revisit because of the intensity of feeling that has been locked away ever since the year Beth turned sixteen, and she left Hungary behind her. 'I know this much; the old hurts never go. In fact they're the things that shape us, they're the things we look to, when we turn out rough-shod, and messy at the edges.'

The thing that struck me the most as I began reading this novel is how beautiful the prose is, line after line. The author conjures up some gorgeous images. More than this, I felt that the author has captured life, captured human emotions; you can recognise parts of yourself here. And she has delivered such genuine truths about love, about families and relationships, and secrets and pain. I wish I could write like this. 

I was very moved by this story, and close to the end I cried. I found the author had awoken memories in myself of past times, some happy, some extremely sad. If a novelist succeeds in touching the heart of the reader in such a way, surely they have succeeded in what they set out to do. This is, amazingly, a first novel, and the author is young. I can't wait to read what comes next. I couldn't say more than if you're thinking of reading The Book of Summers - buy it, read it, enjoy the marvellous prose, return to the prologue and start it all again. 

5/5


Published by Headline Review on 1st March 2012


You can visit the author's blog here and her main website here.


~~~~~

The Flight - M. R. Hall

‘You’ve got that look about you, Mrs Cooper - a woman on a mission.’

Some people love flying and enjoy the thrill of it all, some can take it or leave it, and for others, myself included, it’s all too easy to think about how you are thousands of feet up in the air inside a metal tube that didn’t ought to stay there really as far as you can tell! Being a nervous air passenger myself with a tendency to grip the armrests, or the hand of the person next to me (usually only if I know them already) rather tightly, and having read the synopsis of this novel, it was with not a little trepidation that I began reading…

‘The Flight’ is the fourth novel in the ‘Jenny Cooper’ series written by M. R. Hall. We first met Jenny in ‘The Coroner’, as she arrived to take up her position as the new coroner for the Severn Vale district. Now established in her role, and having taken on and shaken up a good few people in the establishment as well as others along the way, she is back again to tackle the fall-out from a major incident that occurs just outside her patch.

Flight 189 from Heathrow, and destined for JFK, plunges into the Severn Estuary, and the body of one of the passengers, a little ten-year-old girl named Amy Patterson, together with that of a sailor, are both washed ashore in Jenny’s district. As a senior official coroner is appointed to deal with the deaths of all the hundreds on board the flight, Jenny must determine the cause of death of the sailor, whose boat seems to have been sunk as the plane hit. However, as she tries to find answers to all the questions that are raised, she finds that doors are closed and lips are sealed due to the extremely secretive nature of the main investigation into the plane crash. But how could the crash have happened, with the highly sophisticated computerised systems now employed on such a plane leaving virtually no room for error by the pilot or his officer? Was this an horrendous accident, or is there some deeper conspiracy here? And is there a link between some of the passengers who were on flight 189?

Jenny is still haunted by the memories she has uncovered from her childhood, and the responsibility she feels is what drives her in this case to want to know, on behalf of ‘the hapless dead, the innocents’, what caused their deaths. The somewhat turbulent working relationship between Jenny and her officer, Alison, is continued in this story, and there is once again a compelling and convincing inquest. This is a complex, intricate multi-layered story, with an investigation that explores a frightening possibility. The author has evidently done much research into modern air transport. Jenny finds herself once again in an almost impossible situation as she takes on the might of the establishment. It’s difficult to comment much more without revealing the twists and turns of the story, which I don’t want to do here, as the thrill and enjoyment is in discovering them as you read the novel. Suffice it to say the tension builds dramatically towards the nail-biting climax of the story.

I must admit that I am already a fan of this series of novels, and I think Jenny is a super character. Right from meeting her in the first novel, I liked the fact that she has her own difficult personal issues to overcome, and that sometimes these interrupt and interfere with her work. She is intelligent and quick, but flawed, and very human, haunted by certain events in her past and trying to cope in the face of anxiety and panic attacks, and yet she is determined to do a proper job at all times, to fight doggedly for the truth and to keep pushing people to the limits to get answers, whoever she comes up against, and I like her for all these reasons. This is another dramatic, intriguing instalment in the Jenny Cooper series. Looking forward to number 5 already.

As for holidays, well, we’ll hop in the car and stick to the UK this year… ;-)

4.5/5

Thank you very much to the publisher for sending me a proof copy of this novel to read and review.

Published by Mantle on 2nd February 2012


You can visit the author's website here and find out more about his books and about Jenny Cooper's world.