It’s a real pleasure today to be helping launch the blog tour for the latest book from Rachel Burton, The Butterfly Garden, and sharing my publication day review. Published today (28th June) by Boldwood Books, it’s now available as an ebook (free via Kindle Unlimited), as an audiobook, and also in paperback. My thanks, as ever, to Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources for the invitation and support, and to the publishers for my advance reading copy (provided via netgalley).
It’s far too long since I read a book from Rachel. In fact, I was horrified to find it was 2018 when I read and enjoyed The Things We Need to Say – a very different read from the books she’s now writing – and even more annoyed to find I never shared a review on here (but I do remember life was a little difficult around then…). I have no idea how I’ve missed her more recent books – but I am delighted she’s now being published by Boldwood, and I’ll have to make sure I don’t lose touch with her books again. And everything about her latest – that glorious cover, the promised story of love. loss and secrets – put it right at the top of my “must read” list…
1963: When Clara Samuels buys Butterfly Cottage, she knows the scandal she’ll cause. A single woman buying property is not the ‘done thing’, especially not in a village like Carybrook. But Clara has been in love with Butterfly Cottage, and its garden, since she used to play there before the War. And when she reconnects with her childhood friend James, her decision feels serendipitous. But the true scandal is yet to come, because within six months, Clara will leave England under mysterious circumstances, and Butterfly Cottage will stand empty for more than 50 years.
2018: No one is more surprised than Meredith when she’s bequeathed a cottage by a great aunt she’d never heard of. She hopes, briefly, that the inheritance could be the answer to her financial problems. But when she arrives in Suffolk, she is shocked to discover a man is already living there. A young gardener, who claims he was also bequeathed half of Butterfly Cottage.
As the pair try to unravel their complicated situation, they unearth a decades old mystery involving Clara, the garden, and a stack of letters left unread for over 50 years…
A gripping and beautiful tale of love, loss and secrets. Perfect for fans of Rachel Hore, Lorna Cook and Kathryn Hughes.
With a struggling business, financial problems, and a formerly supportive partner who’s now only making her issues feel all the more insurmountable, Meredith’s inheritance – the beautiful Butterfly Cottage, from a great aunt she’d never heard of – couldn’t have come at a better time. Her only thought is that selling it will put her back on her feet again – but she then discovers that her inheritance has to be shared with the gardener, currently living outside in his caravan, who wants to return the garden to its former glory and isn’t ready to put the cottage on the market.
She discovers that her great aunt Clara didn’t live in the cottage for over fifty years, only returning before her death to put her affairs in order – and as Meredith slowly becomes more comfortable with the idea of a fresh start in an idyllic setting, she also wants to find out more about Clara and her long and unexplained disappearance. Locals tell her that letters were delivered after Clara had left – and when they find them in a battered tin in the garden shed, her heartbreaking story begins to become clearer.
So, an intriguing mystery – and the full story is told in a perfectly balanced dual-time story, where we find Clara, in the early 1960s and defying society’s expectations at that time, returning to her childhood village as a teacher and buying the cottage of her dreams as a single woman. Her story is quite beautifully told, the era perfectly recreated in all the small details – and the romance at its centre is one of those wonderfully all-consuming ones you feel at your core, but not without complications, disappointment and heartbreak.
And, of course, there’s also the possibility of romance in the present day story – every individual in this book is quite wonderfully drawn, and very real – and gardener Zach with his dry humour and rippling muscles made my heart beat a little faster too. But the narrative is driven by the piece by piece uncovering of Clara’s story – intriguing, unpredictable, often emotional, and making the pages turn ever faster – with both timelines equally engaging in every way, perfectly entwined, and with none of those uncomfortable wrenches when you feel you’re leaving your preferred story behind. There’s a rather nice mirroring between the two stories too – and an intriguing question mark over Clara’s intentions when leaving a shared inheritance.
And there are some particularly nice touches to the story’s telling. When you read and enjoy as many dual time stories as I do, you’ll know they’re often linked by those lucky discoveries (the photographs, the diary, the letters, the hidden treasures…) that provide all the answers – and yes, the discovered letters certainly do move the story forward, but I’d already shared a smile with Meredith as she observed that things like that didn’t happen in real life, only in adventure novels. Although the clues are there, the resolution of this mystery happens more through human intervention – and I rather liked the way the author didn’t tie everything up with a neat bow at the book’s end, but allowed the reader some scope to imagine their own happy ending.
This really was the loveliest read, and I thoroughly enjoyed the storytelling – a book I’d very much recommend to others, and I’ll be looking forward to reading more from this very talented author.
About the author
Rachel Burton is the bestselling author of historical timeslip novels and has previously written romantic comedies.
Rachel was born in Cambridge and grew up in a house full of books and records. She has read obsessively since she first realised those black squiggles on the pages that lined her parents’ bookshelves were actually words and it has gone down in family history that any time something interesting happened, she missed it because she had her nose in a book.
After reading for a degree in Classics and another in English Literature she accidentally fell into a career in law but her love of books prevailed as she realised that she wanted to slip into imaginary worlds of her own making. She eventually managed to write her first novel on her lunch breaks.
She is obsessed with old houses and the secrets they keep, with abandoned gardens and locked gates, with family histories and surprising revelations, and with the outcomes of those surprises many generations later.
She lives in Yorkshire with her husband, a variety of cats and far too many books. By writing novels she now has an excuse for her head being forever in the clouds.
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