A secluded house. A lost notebook. A wartime secret.
1942: Young Irish nurse Ellen arrives at May Day House, tasked with helping the men there rehabilitate. But there’s something strange about the house, surrounded by water, on its own island in the Thames. And then there are the men: traumatised by their experiences of war, and subject to troubling methods in a desperate race to get them back to duty. As Ellen gets drawn into the world of May Day House, she starts to realise this will be no place to hide away from her own troubles…
2013: Philip and Meredith are the proud new owners of May Day House. Following a string of tragedies, the couple have moved to the area in search of a new start. But all is not what it seems in the riverside community. As their plans for the rundown house meet resistance from the neighbours, Meredith finds herself slowly unravelling: she hears voices on the water, sees figures where there can be no one there. When she finds an old notebook from the war, she seeks solace in the stories about the former patients of the island.
But will shadows from the past threaten her future happiness – and even her life?
Purchase Links - https://mybook.to/HouseWaterSocial
The premise of this book sounded superb - a crumbling house on an island in the Thames and a couple with tragedy in their past. It was clear from the description that this was going to be one that kept me on the edge of my seat and I wasn't disappointed.
It's quite a slow burner to begin with as the scene is set and lots of hints are dropped about Merry's fragile mental state. With the benefit of hindsight, there were also lots of hints dropped about how events were going to unfold, but I was so caught up in the story that I failed to spot a single one of them. I was successfully misled right up to the moment of revelation and yet it didn't feel like a shock when the baddie was finally revealed.
In the other part of the story, I felt less of a connection to the characters, but their's was an important story to tell. In a society which is far more tolerant of PTSD and the effects of conflict on people, it is easy to forget how the people suffering these things were treated less than a century ago. It isn't just the attitudes - although these were bad enough - but the treatments were often far worse and caused far more damage than the original trauma. This is described here in vivid detail, through Ellen's eyes and it made me realise how traumatic it must have been for the nurses who witnessed these treatments as well.
Overall, this was a story that kept me reading and it's one I'll be recommending to my mum, which is always a sign of a good book, as we don't often like the same genres. I'm sure Victoria Darke is an author I'll be coming back to in the future.
Victoria began her working life as a broadcast journalist at the BBC, before moving into the freelance world. She’s worked for outlets including the Telegraph, Time Out and Al Jazeera, and spent six-years living and working in Qatar. Nowadays she balances novel writing with lecturing in journalism at Kingston University.
Victoria is the author of three novels writing as Victoria Scott - Patience, Grace and The Women Who Wouldn’t Leave. Patience, her debut, was the Booksellers’ Association Book of the Month.
Her first book for Boldwood will be a dual timeline historic suspense novel, writing as Victoria Darke. The House In The Water will be published in May 2024.
She lives on an island in the Thames with her husband and two children and a cat called Alice.
Social Media Links –
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Toryscott
Newsletter Sign Up: https://bit.ly/VictoriaDarkeNews
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