Wedded to Her Enemy Knight by Lissa Morgan - #bookreview

June 1460

Edmund Deverell leaned on the rail and watched the town of Calais, with its isolated but stubbornly entrenched population of English colonists, slowly recede into the morning sea mist...

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I am required to make it clear at the beginning of my reviews that I received this book for free from the author. I have not been paid for doing this and all opinions are my own. I am Bookshop.org affiliated, which means I earn a very small amount of money if you buy from there using my direct link. Although I include purchase links to Amazon, I am not affiliated with them. I include them to make it easy for you to navigate to them if you so wish.

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The Blurb

An enemies to lovers, convenient marriage Medieval romance

A house divided…

A passion ignited!

Outraged when Yorkist knight Edmund Deverell stakes his centuries-old claim on her beloved home, Lancastrian maiden Isobel Calvert won’t leave without a fight! But her best defense against destitution is to propose marriage—to her enemy!

After the pain of his first union, Edmund had never planned to wed again, his only allegiance now is to the House of York. Still, he can’t deny a practical marriage will secure his legacy and leave his emotions intact. But days of verbal sparring with his new wife lead to nights of unforgettable passion, until Edmund finds his loyalties wavering dangerously… 

My Review

Lissa Morgan is my favourite author of this type of historical fiction. Needless to say, when she asked me if I would review this book for her, I was more than happy to do so. This book did not disappoint in any way. In fact, I think this is my favourite of those of her novels that I have previously read.

The book is set in 1460 during the Wars of the Roses and is a wonderful escape into medieval England.  The main character, Isobel, is a Lancastrian and the last remaining survivor of the Calvert family. At this point in history, the Yorkists are on the rise, and the King's Knight, Sir Edmund Deverell, arrives at her home and commandeers her property.

Isobel is faced with the prospect of marrying a man old enough to be her grandfather, or to enter a convent and live out her days as a nun. At this point in history, women had no choice about how to live their lives, and the author depicts this patriarchal society extremely well.

However, Isobel is a rebel and takes matters into her own hands by suggesting a marriage of convenience to Edmund. This will enable her to remain in her beloved home. However, it isn't long before a mutual attraction and desire between them becomes evident. This is a wonderful enemies-to-lovers story which the author tells well.

I loved Isobel's character. She is strong, determined and feisty. Although Edmund had arrived at her home with a sense of entitlement, it quickly becomes apparent that he is a caring man who is carrying much hurt from a past marriage which we learn as some of the book is told from his perspective.

I loved how immersive this novel was. The author has researched her time period extremely well and depicts it with clarity, bringing an authenticity to her novel.

There is a mix of narrative and dialogue throughout; both of which move the story along at an appropriate pace for this genre of novel.

This was an engaging story which I enjoyed reading very much. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys historical fiction with an enemies-to-lovers trope.

Book Details

ISBN: 978 0369769756

Publisher:  Harlequin Historical

Formats: e-book and paperback

No. of Pages:  272 (paperback)

Purchase Links

Bookshop.org

Amazon UK

Vinted

Amazon US

About the Author

Lissa Morgan hails from Wales but has travelled far and wide over the years, usually in pursuit of the next new job.  A history graduate and former archivist, she now works in academia and freelance website design, which she fits in around her writing time. She lives between the mountains and the sea in rugged north-west Wales surrounded by medieval castles that provide the perfect inspiration for her books.

You can also find Lissa at:

Author Website

Facebook

Bluesky

Instagram

My Other Blog Posts Featuring This Author

Alliance with Her Renegade Knight

The Warrior's Forbidden Maiden

The Warrior's Reluctant Wife

(book and media courtesy of the author)

(all opinions are my own)

(Bookshop.org affiliated)

The Lost and Found Bookshop by Susan Wiggs - #BookReview

 

This was a big moment for Natalie. The biggest in her career so far, for sure. The whole company had gathered in the reception hall of Pinnacle Fine Wines to celebrate her promotion and the million-dollar deal she'd made for the firm. But her own mother was a no-show.

True to form.

To be fair, the drive from the city up to Archangel could be unpredictable in the afternoon. It was equally possible that Blythe Harper had completely forgotten that she'd promised to show up to celebrate her daughter's achievement.

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Heartbroken Natalie Harper inherits her mother’s charming, cash-strapped bookshop and finds herself the carer for her ailing grandfather Andrew. She thinks it’s best to move him to an assisted-living home to ensure his care, but to pay for it, Natalie will have to sell up the bookshop. However, Grandpa Andrew owns the building and refuses to budge.

Moving into the studio apartment above the shop, Natalie hires a contractor, Peach Gallagher, to do some repairs. His young daughter becomes a regular at the shop, and she and Natalie begin reading together while Peach works. Slowly, Natalie’s sorrow begins to dissipate as her life becomes an unexpected journey of new friendships. From unearthing hidden artefacts in the bookshop’s walls, to learning the truth about her family, the bookshop is full of surprises. Can Natalie reveal her own heart’s desire and turn a new page…?

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I can never resist books about book shops so when I found this on the library shelves, I knew I had to borrow it. And what a good choice it was. It did not disappoint in any way, and now I cannot wait to read more from this author.

In fact, she has an extensive back catalogue and having checked, I am delighted that the library has lots of them in the county.

There is a cast of well developed and likeable, characters. Natalie is an excellent main character and her relationship and challenges with her grandfather were wonderful to observe.

It has a certain charm to it, and Natalie was easy to identify with. She is a woman who, at the outset, is trapped in a job that she finds unfulfilling, and it was fascinating to see her character mature as she takes on the bookshop and has to deal with so much loss.

The bookshop itself was as significant as the characters, and I could almost smell the mustiness of the old books, as well as the freshly printed pages of the new. The author has done an excellent job of bringing the shop to life on the page.

On the surface, this book is about grief, but it is about so much more. Love, hope and passion are woven throughout it's pages. Some might say the book is predictable, and certainly there were no rapid twists and turns. But sometimes, a calm stroll through a book is exactly what I need, and this one hit the nail firmly on the head for me.

ISBN: 978 0008358754

Publisher: Harper Collins

Format: e-book, audio, paperback and hardback

No. of Pages: 400 (paperback)

About the Author:

Susan Wiggs's life is all about family, friends…and fiction. She lives at the water's edge on an island in Puget Sound, and in good weather, she commutes to her writers' group in a 21-foot motorboat. She’s been featured in the national media, including NPR, PRI, and USA Today, has given programs for the US Embassies in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and is a popular speaker locally, nationally, internationally, and on the high seas.

From the very start, her writings have illuminated the everyday dramas of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances. Her books celebrate the power of love, the timeless bonds of family and the fascinating nuances of human nature. Today, she is an international best-selling, award-winning author, with millions of copies of her books in print in numerous countries and languages. According to Publishers Weekly, Wiggs writes with "refreshingly honest emotion," and the Salem Statesman Journal adds that she is "one of our best observers of stories of the heart [who] knows how to capture emotion on virtually every page of every book." Booklist characterises her books as "real and true and unforgettable."

Her novels have appeared in the #1 spot on the New York Times Bestseller List, and have captured readers’ hearts around the globe with translations into more than 20 languages and 30 countries. She is a three-time winner of the RITA Award,. Her recent novel, The Apple Orchard, is currently being made into a film, and The Lakeshore Chronicles has been optioned for adaptation into a series.

The author is a former teacher, a Harvard graduate, an avid hiker, an amateur photographer, a good skier and terrible golfer, yet her favorite form of exercise is curling up with a good book. She lives on an island in Puget Sound, where she divides her time between sleeping and waking.

(author photo and bio. information courtesy of the publishers website - harpercollins.com)

The Tunnel by A. B. Yehoshua - #BookReview - Translated by Stuart Schoffman

"The father ladles the thick red tomato sauce with floating yellow egg yolks into two deep, white dishes, and makes room on the table, next to the cheese, for the brain scan. And as the storm rages outside, and daylight grows dim, he turns on a reading lamp so the son can study the convolutions of his father's brain like the innards of a computer."

Zvi Luria has begun to lose his memory. At the beginning he only makes small mistakes, forgetting first names and taking home the wrong child from his grandson's kindergarten, but he knows that things will only get worse. He's 73 and a retired road engineer. His neurologist hints at the path his illness might take and suggests ways of combatting it, with the help of his wife, Dina.

Dina, a respected paediatrician, is keen for him to return to meaningful activity, and suggests he volunteers to work with his old colleagues at the Israel Roads Authority.

This is how Luria finds himself at the Ramon Crater in the Negev desert planning a secret road for the army with the son of his former colleague. But there's a mystery about a certain hill on the route of this road. Who are the people living there and why are they trapped? And should the hill be flattened and the family evicted, or should a tunnel beneath it be built?

With humour and great tenderness, A. B. Yehoshua depicts the love between Luria and his wife as they confront the challenges of his illness. Just when Luria's sense of identity becomes more compromised, then does he find himself on this extraordinary adventure involving people even more vulnerable than himself, enabling a rich meditation on the entwined identities of Israeli Jews and Palestinians and on the nature of memory itself.

Yehoshua weaves a masterful story about a long and loving marriage, interlaced with biting social commentary and caustic humour.

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I enjoyed reading this book very much indeed. It's gentility was mesmerising and the writing and translation from Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman is superb. 

Perhaps wrongly, I would not ordinarily rush to read a book about an elderly man who is grappling with the onset of dementia. My presumption would be that it would be rather depressing as, in reality, it is something that many of us may have to face one day. How wrong that assumption would be as this is a novel that is sensitive, compassionate and full of love. It is often humorous and exquisitely moving.

The book begins with Luria, along with his wife, receiving his dementia diagnosis from the neurologist who advises this elderly retired man to return to work and to be passionate with his wife. Volunteering to assist in designing a road with the company that he used to work for brings the titular tunnel into focus. Not only does the book deal with the designing of a tunnel, which at no point becomes dull, but it is also a metaphor for what Luria feels is happening with his deteriorating brain as he realises that whole sections of his memory are disappearing.

As his condition deteriorates throughout the book we see him become increasingly disorientated. Witnessing his attempts to come to terms with what is happening to him was extremely poignant.

I loved the characters in this book. Luria could be anyone's grandfather. There were several times in this book that I would have happily hugged him.

It is intelligently written and thought provoking. It does not shy away from the Israeli and Palestinian conflict but considers it with awareness and sensitivity. 

An excellent novel that I highly recommend.

ISBN: 978 1912600038

Publisher: Halban

About the Author:

Born in Jerusalem in 1936, A. B. Yehoshua is the author of twelve novels, a collection of short stories and several plays and volumes of essays. He has won prizes worldwide and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages and adapted for film and opera. An outspoken critic of both Israeli and Palestinian policies, he continues to speak about and search for solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.







About the Translator:

Stuart Schoffman, a journalist and screenwriter, moved to Jerusalem in 1988. His latest translations of Israeli fiction are To the Edge of Sorrow (Schocken) by Aharon Appelfeld and The Tunnel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by A.B. Yehoshua.

(bio information courtesy of Jewish Review of Books)

Love is Blind (The Rapture of Brodie Moncur) by William Boyd #BookReview

Brodie Moncur stood in the main window of Channon & Co. and looked out at the hurrying pedestrians, the cabs, carriages and labouring drays of George Street. It was raining ......

So begins the story of Brodie Moncur. Set at the end of the nineteenth century, William Boyd's heart stopping new novel follows the fortunes of Brodie, a young Scottish musician about to embark on the story of his life.

When Brodie is offered a job in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different new chapter in his life. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous pianist irrevocably changes his future - and sparks an obsessive love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum. As Brodie moves from Paris to St Petersburg to Edinburgh and back again, his love for Lika and its dangerous consequences pursue him around Europe and beyond, during an era of overwhelming change as the nineteenth century becomes the twentieth.

Love is Blind is a tale of dizzying passion and brutal revenge; of artistic endeavour and the illusions it creates; of all the possibilities that life can offer, and how cruelly they can be snatched away. At once an intimate portrait of one man'e life and an expansive exploration of the beginning of the twentieth century, Love is Blind is a masterly new novel from one of Britain's best loved storytellers.

I always feel incredibly optimistic when the first book that I read in any given year is a good one. It always suggests to me that I have a worthwhile reading year ahead and having just read this book I am anticipating an excellent year.

Mr Boyd has written a well structured and character driven novel. His sense of time and place is excellently portrayed through sound research and a wonderful writing style. He not only depicts the period of the setting through the minutiae of Brodie's life but also through the wider issues prevalent at the time.

Geographically, the book is wide ranging and the reader is able to accompany Brodie on his travels. Along the way, we are introduced to a plethora of characters but this never felt confusing.  I have read books in the past, written by lesser authors and have found this same scenario difficult to follow. However, with this book I always felt firm in the knowledge of where we were and who we were meeting and the author handles this with skill.

I felt completely immersed in Brodie's world and could not wait to get back to reading it each day. It is a story of music, love, obsession and the chaos which these can create. This is a memorable book which I would encourage you to read for yourself.

Have you already read this book? Have you read anything else by William Boyd? I would love to hear your thoughts on his writing.

ISBN: 978 0241295939

Publisher: Viking

About the Author:

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of fifteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. He is married and divides his time between London and south west France.