Madame Burova by Ruth Hogan - #TuesdayTeaser

Hello and welcome to this week's Tuesday Teaser. The place where we take a sneaky peek at a book that has caught my eye.

This week we are looking at Madame Burova by Ruth Hogan, which was released in paperback last week.

I have been a fan of Ruth's books ever since I read The Keeper of Lost Things in 2018. If you have not read my review of this enchanting book, you can go straight to it by clicking here. 

She has since published The Wisdom of Sally Red Shoes, and Queenie Malone's Paradise Hotel, all of which are on my gargantuan 'to be read' pile. In the meantime, I am elevating, Madame Burova up the list, and if anyone is planning on joining me in reading this book then please let me know.

The Blurb

Madame Burova - Tarot Reader, Palmist and Clairvoyant is retiring and leaving her booth on the Brighton seafront after fifty years.

Imelda Burova has spent a lifetime keeping other people's secrets and her silence has come at a price. She has seen the lovers and the liars, the angels and the devils, the dreamers and the fools. Her cards had unmasked them all and her cards never lied. But Madame Burova is weary of other people's lives, their ghosts from the past and other people's secrets, she needs rest and a little piece of life for herself. Before that, however, she has to fulfil a promise made a long time ago. She holds two brown envelopes in her hand, and she has to deliver them.

In London, it is time for another woman to make a fresh start. Billie has lost her university job, her marriage, and her place in the world when she discovers something that leaves her very identity in question. Determined to find answers, she must follow a trail which might just lead right to Madame Burova's door.

In a story spanning over fifty years, Ruth Hogan conjures a magical world of 1970s holiday camps and seaside entertainers, eccentrics, heroes and villains, the lost and the found. Young people, with their lives before them, make choices which echo down the years. And a wall of death rider is part of a love story which will last through time.

In the Beginning...

The Promise

Madame Burova was a woman who knew where the bodies were buried. She had spent a lifetime keeping other people's secrets and her silence had come at a price. Some revelations - forbidden affairs and minor indiscretions - had been easy enough to bear. Like feathers on the wind. But others, dark and disturbing, had pricked her conscience and been a burden on her soul. She had seen the lovers and the liars, the angels and the devils, the dreamers and the fools. Her cards had unmasked them all and her cards never lied. Madame Burova knew the killer, the victim and the murder weapon.

Outside, the warm, late-summer twilight was smudged with soft thumbprints of light from the illuminations strung along the promenade. High season was coming to an end, but for now the screams and squeals of excitement from the funfair still carried on the wind; soprano notes duetting with the baritone of the waves booming onto the beach and rattling the pebbles as they slunk back into the sea. Madame Burova - Tarot Reader, Palmist and Clairvoyant - proclaimed the painted sign on the front of the booth where she had been dukkering, as her Romany mother always called it, for over fifty years. Today had been her swansong. Madame Burova was retiring: reluctantly, sadly, but inevitably. Her mind was still sharp and her gift as infallible as ever. But she was weary of other people's lives - their questions, their problems and their secrets. She needed rest and a little piece of life for herself while she still had the chance. She sat down in a chair beside a small round gypsy table covered with a velvet cloth, where her crystal ball stood next to a silver-framed photograph of her long-dead, beloved borzoi, Dasha. The rings on her fingers flashed and sparkled as she picked up two brown envelopes. She had been entrusted as their guardian and had kept their secrets safe and silent for all these years. She turned them over in her hands. The hands that had held countless others and read the future in their palms. The envelopes held a secret that had troubled Madame Burova more than most, and now the time had come for her to open them and fulfil a promise made long ago.

Oh my goodness, I want to carry on reading this straightaway. I am not even sure that it will even make it to the 'to be read' pile!