This is one of those books which is packed full of everything you could possible want from a story to sweep you away.
Told from the different perspectives of various different characters you are thrown into getting to know a lot of people and quickly. I did have to go back and reread who everyone was as I was a bit lost and felt as I had not read the first novel where these characters are introduced I was at a disadvantage. However once I did this I got a sense of how they were related and something about their past I was able to involve myself fully with the book.
As letters from the here and now start landing on doormats across Melstead St Mary, you almost wish that Miss Marple would appear to solve it all for these people and make her wry observations about people’s actions and reactions.
Evelyn, celebrating twenty years of marriage to Kit, is shocked to receive one which brings doubt on her actions from the past and questions about what she did during the war.
Julia, weak, feeble and under the command of her husband receives one, but she knows she has probably done something wrong anyway, she has spent all her life in repentance.
Hope, driven by her work, driven to escape when she receives a letter is driven into another state. One that everyone desires she will come out of.
Romily, the matriarch of this family. Bringing them all together, keeping them all apart where necessary and trying to live her own life.
Full of secrets, mysteries and love this really is a book which did indeed sweep me away from rural Suffolk, London, Oxford and Palm Springs. It has characters to love, loathe, trust and distrust. It made me change my mind about some and know I was completely right about others. This was a book which I invested in and it gave me an abundance of returns. Thank you Erica James, wonderful storytelling.
Thank you to the publisher via netgalley for the opportunity to read this book.
Letters From the Past is published on the 16th April.
I am relatively new to Erica James work but if this is the standard then I am going to read more starting with Coming Home to Island House where we first get to meet these characters.
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