Lost in The Distant Hours...

So Kate Morton's latest tome, The Distant Hours, arrived on my doorstep last Friday. Curiously, my copy seems to have a misprint on the book jacket and spine - in the picture 'The Distant Hours' appears in yellow, on mine it doesn't appear at all, unless you hold the cover in a certain light where you can see it has been lightly embossed. At first I was a bit irritated by its less than perfect cover but actually, I quite like it. Besides, nothing was going to stop me from opening it up and getting started straight away.

Anyway, enough of that, onto the book. I don't think I can actually write a review that will do it justice yet - I literally buried my head in it all weekend and only finished it a couple of hours ago. As you know from an earlier post, I loved The House at Riverton (Kate Morton's debut novel) and wasn't sure she could top it. Well, with The Distant Hours she's done just that. It's so richly layered with sub-plots that every time I turned a page there seemed to be a new twist. The majority of the story is told from the perspective of Edith Burchill, a young, bookish woman who credits a favourite novel from her childhood - The True History of The Mud Man by Raymond Blythe - for her love of the written word, and her subsequent job in publishing. Little does she know that her own life is going to become intertwined with that of the author's surviving family - the 'Sisters Blythe' -  Persephone, Seraphina and Juniper, and the home they share, Milderhurst Castle. The castle itself dominates the story - beautifully dark, gothic, strangely controlling, it seems to lurk in the background of every line in the book, and yet many times I longed to be there, standing right infront of it, exploring the 'veins' and the Muniment Room. I can't begin to go into the details right now, I think I'm going to have to come back and post a proper review when I've had time to think about it, but I savoured this book from start to finish. The characters were so real and, at points, so tragically flawed, that I became lost in their stories. Beautifully written, an utter delight to read, I will definitely be revisiting this in the near future. By the time I got to the final pages, I was pleasantly surprised by a few last-minute twists, but absolutely gutted that I'd finished the book. Read it, get lost in it, then read it again - a definite must-read.