The Letter
Kathryn Hughes
(Headline Review)
In 1970’s Manchester charity
shop volunteer Tina Craig finds an unsent letter in the pocket of an old suit. Finding
out who wrote the letter and why it was never posted provides an escape from
her own troubles, and maybe the chance of a new and happier life.
Thirty-four years
earlier on the eve of World War Two Billie Stirling knows he has done wrong by
the love of his life. Before he goes to war, he attempts to make amends by
writing her a letter.
The chain of events
that brings their two stories together takes Tina from Manchester to rural
Ireland and to the heart of a tragic love story.
Calling a book ‘beach
reading’ is a backhanded compliment at best, and often a rather sniffy put-down.
This novel is firmly in that genre, and, to my surprise, I very much enjoyed
it.
Hughes tells the sort of
story that keeps your interest and makes you care about the characters; both things
are far harder to do than some reviewers think. She is also unafraid of
tackling serious issues like domestic violence, addiction and the way unmarried
mothers were treated in the 1940’s.
She isn’t a great prose
stylist and has a habit of telling her readers things she could just as well
show them. Her plot is also quite reliant on secondary characters turning up who
just happen to have the next piece of information her protagonists need. In
Hughes’s defence Dickens was fond of that trope too and he’s got a secure place
in the canon.
Best of all this is a
book that does the thing anyone who reads does so to experience, it tells a
story that engages. This reviewer prefers this to pretention any time and so, I’d
bet, do Kathryn Hughes army of fans.
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