If you have read Ivy Lane, then you may be familiar with a couple of the characters which feature in Appleby Farm. If you haven’t then well, you will have to go and read Ivy Lane when you have finished this one.
Freya Moorcroft is rather nomadic, flitting around from job to job and place to place, never staying anywhere for more than a year. Whilst she is content in Ivy Lane, she knows there always one place she can call home.
That place is Appleby Farm, where her aunt and uncle. Many a happy childhood school holiday and weekends was spent here and it is someone where Freya feels she is at her best even when feeling her worst.
A phone call leads Freya back to Appleby Farm and when she gets there it seems she needs to help her aunt and uncle just as they helped her when she was small.
With financial disaster looming ever closer, Freya has to use all she knows to try and turn round the farm and hold on to the past whilst surviving in the future.
She meets an old childhood friend, who is in a similar predicament but has somehow made a success. She meets new friends who show her what can be achieved and old friends from Ivy Lane become just as important as the race seems to be on to make Appleby Farm a working success.
Add to the mix as any good women’s fiction will do, there is a love interest, the problems of long distance relationships, previous children and family disharmony as well. This book has all you could want and more.
This is a book to lose yourself in. Cathy Bramley has a skill in making you feel for all the characters even the ones who you might not be so keen on! added to this is the setting and the prospect of sweeping dales, cold crisp days and nights in front of the fire means that this book is perfect for all fans of this particular type of fiction.
Cathy Bramley is up there with Trisha Ashley, Katie Fforde, Carole Matthews.
Appleby Farm was originally published in four parts but I waited until it was out as a whole novel to devour. Patience when the story is so good is sometimes difficult.
Her latest novel, Wickham Hall is out now in the same part format, but I will wait until I can devour it as a whole.
The Book Jotter 