Tuesday, 25 April 2023

Late Delivery

 

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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