I’m delighted today to be joining the blog tour for The House in the Water, the Boldwood Books debut from Victoria Darke, and sharing my review. Published on 27th May, it’s now available as an ebook (free via Kindle Unlimited), in paperback, and as an audiobook. Many thanks, as always, to Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources for the invitation and support, and to the publishers for my advance reading e-copy (provided via netgalley).
I’ll happily admit I’ve been rather excited about this one. Last year, I was delighted to discover one of Victoria’s books as a new-to-me author – The Women Who Wouldn’t Leave, written as Victoria Scott (her alter ego, who writes uplifting book club fiction) and published by Aria Fiction. I absolutely adored it – emotional, engaging, one of those rare and perfect reads, and one of my Books of the Year in 2023 (you can read my full review again here). And yes, it was a bit of a surprise when I saw that her first book with Boldwood was being described variously as gothic timeslip and historical suspense – quite a change, and I could fully understand why she’d decided to write it under a different name. But I’d been so impressed by her writing that I was really intrigued to see how well she’d handle something entirely different – and if I tell you that I read it in one breathless sitting and loved every moment, I think you might just have your answer…
A secluded house. A lost notebook. A wartime secret.
1942: Young Irish nurse Ellen arrives at May Day House, tasked with helping the men there rehabilitate. But there’s something strange about the house, surrounded by water, on its own island in the Thames. And then there are the men: traumatised by their experiences of war, and subject to troubling methods in a desperate race to get them back to duty. As Ellen gets drawn into the world of May Day House, she starts to realise this will be no place to hide away from her own troubles…
2013: Philip and Meredith are the proud new owners of May Day House. Following a string of tragedies, the couple have moved to the area in search of a new start. But all is not what it seems in the riverside community. As their plans for the rundown house meet resistance from the neighbours, Meredith finds herself slowly unravelling: she hears voices on the water, sees figures where there can be no one there. When she finds an old notebook from the war, she seeks solace in the stories about the former patients of the island.
But will shadows from the past threaten her future happiness – and even her life?
Every now and then, a book comes along that grabs you from the very beginning, wraps you up in its story, and refuses to let go. This was an entirely gripping and wonderfully handled dual time story, the threads tied together by unexpected links and a stunning sense of place – the contemporary story becoming a psychological thriller with touches of the supernatural, the historical thread both fascinating and disturbing, and so very well researched.
In the present day, after a difficult time in their lives, Meredith and Philip take on the challenge of renovating May Day House, a former hospital on an island in the Thames, and making a fresh start by starting a business. The challenges are considerable – it’s very isolated, only accessible by boat, and the locals don’t exactly welcome them with open arms. And Meredith is often there alone – he’s an airline pilot – when her imagination begins to run away with her. Or might the rumours that the house is haunted be true? The discovery of a journal written by a nurse who worked a the house during World War 2 reveals a fascinating and compelling story, and provides some distraction – but present day issues and problems begin to take over, with things being not quite they seem and with a particular edge of threat and danger.
Ellen arrives at May Day House in 1942, a nurse with disturbing wartime experiences of her own, keen to help with the care and treatment of men suffering with what we now know as PTSD. She expects the methods to reflect her previous experience with a particularly caring doctor in Egypt, but finds that the treatment they administer is considerably more brutal – injections of insulin to induce coma, reliving traumatic experiences, and electric shock therapy – with the aim of returning them to the front. And when one of the men becomes rather more to her than a patient, her life becomes – putting it mildly – increasingly difficult.
The way the perfectly paced stories become entwined makes it such a compelling read, full of the unexpected, shocks and surprises, and echoes from the past. The author is a quite wonderful storyteller, building an exceptional level of sympathy and engagement with both women, making you feel present throughout their experiences – and May Day House itself almost becomes another character in their stories, wonderfully drawn and described, slowly revealing its disturbing secrets.
This was a book I found entirely impossible to put down, reading into the early hours – and when I wasn’t reading, I could think of nothing else. I was so very engaged at an emotional level, and the twists and turns just kept coming all the way to its perfect and wholly satisfying ending. A stunning read – and I really couldn’t recommend it more highly.
About the author
Victoria began her working life as a broadcast journalist at the BBC, before moving into the freelance world. She’s worked for outlets including the Telegraph, Time Out and Al Jazeera, and spent six-years living and working in Qatar. Nowadays she balances novel writing with lecturing in journalism at Kingston University.
Victoria is the author of three novels writing as Victoria Scott – Patience, Grace and The Women Who Wouldn’t Leave. Patience, her debut, was the Booksellers’ Association Book of the Month.
She lives on an island in the Thames with her husband and two children and a cat called Alice.
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