The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury Publishing)
A very dear friend recommended this book to me and I was more nervous than usual in starting it. While we are old friends and share lots in common our taste in books/plays doesn't always correspond. In general if I love a play she is ambivalent (or really didn't like it) and vice versa so a lot was riding on this read.
I'm pleased to say that I was drawn in from the start and begrudged all the time I had to spend at work and not reading it.
I'm at a loss to explain the book, it starts with a man getting off a train and losing all his memories, a lighthouse, alternative histories and even time travel...
The publisher's blurb also doesn't give too much away:
Come home, if you remember. The postcard has been held at the sorting office for ninety-one years, waiting to be delivered to Joe Tournier. On the front is a lighthouse - Eilean Mor, in the Outer Hebrides.
Joe has never left England, never even left London. He is a British slave, one of thousands throughout the French Empire. He has a job, a wife, a baby daughter. But he also has flashes of a life he cannot remember and of a world that never existed - a world where English is spoken in England, and not French. And now he has a postcard of a lighthouse built just six months ago, that was first written nearly one hundred years ago, by a stranger who seems to know him very well.
Joe's journey to unravel the truth will take him from French-occupied London to a remote Scottish island, and back through time itself as he battles for his life - and for a very different future.
All of this vagueness works in the books favour, and the confusion I experienced while reading the book definitely mirrored Joe's which made for an unexpectedly immersive read.
I was lucky enough to get another Natasha Pulley book as a 'Secret Santa' present and I am looking forward to diving into her back catalogue. There is some incredible violence in this book, and at times it is shocking but at no point did I want to stop reading.
