Orphans of the Storm – Celia Imrie

Marcella married young, swept away by Michael a man who has ambitions to be the best tailor in Nice, South of France. However the romance has gone and Marcella is left with a jealous husband who wishes to control and bully.

Marcella makes the momentous decision that she needs to leave this man for the sake of herself and her two young boys. Divorce is not going to be easy, it is 1911 and the French courts need to decide whether this will go ahead and what happens to the two young boys.

Margaret has been touring around Europe with friends, but she is bored and wishes to return to her home in America. When the chance to travel home in style on the RMS Titanic, Margaret makes the fatal choice.

How can these different lives cross? It is inevitable that they will, but perhaps not in the circumstances that everyone thinks. When you begin a book which clearly features one of the most famous ships in history, there is an inevitably about it – prior knowledge means you known what happens on that fateful night in April 1912. Interestingly the event doesn’t happen until well into the last third of the book – a sense of trepidation is built as the story of Michael and Marcella is built upon.

The introduction of Margaret, becomes clearer as the book goes on and as readers we are swept under the sea as everyone’s worlds change.

Whilst slow at points, I did wonder where and how this book was going to culminate and I was so intrigued by the characters that were created. I was completely surprised by the fact that whilst this story was fiction – every person and experience was based on real people and real events. The information and research given at the end of the book is fascinating and brought more to the story than if it had been pure fiction.

Very different to previous novels and I noticed that the author has had some assistance in research which is fine, but made me doubt as to how much was really the author. That though is probably my fussiness and for fans of historical fiction this definitely a book that is worth a read.

Thank you to the publisher via netgalley for the opportunity to read this book.

Orphans of the Storm is out now.