THE STRANGE FATE OF KITTY EASTON
Elizabeth Speller
Hachette
In the five years since the end of World War 1, former infantry officer Laurence Bertram has finally started to look to the future.
Faced with the choice between a permanent teaching position in Westminster and a year as a private tutor in Italy, he receives an invitation from his architect and friend, William Bolitho, to examine a church he is restoring in Easton Deadall, a small Wiltshire village on the Easton estate.
Although the heir to Easton Hall was killed during the war, it remains the home of his widow, Lydia, younger brother Julian and Lydia's sister, Frances.
Although run down during the war, it remains a beautiful place, but Laurence soon learns that the shadow that pervades the once vibrant estate runs deeper than mere neglect.
At first he thinks it is the result of the mysterious disappearance some 13 years earlier of Lydia's 5-year-old daughter, Kitty; her mother continues to believe she is alive and will one day return, and both Frances and Julian fear that the renovations may unearth her remains, a shock that would devastate the frail and ailing Lydia.
The arrival of the youngest Easton son, Patrick, reveals other tensions within the family, and hints at further secrets buried in the past. Then a young maid from the Hall vanishes and a woman's body is discovered buried beneath the church, and Laurence finds himself drawn into the role of detective, a position very much at odds with the reclusive life he has adopted since the war.
With its flashbacks to the war and examination of the damage caused to individuals and communities of such conflict, the novel has drawn comparisons to Birdsong and the Regeneration trilogy.
While I didn't find it as compelling as either - and it could have done with some firmer editing (the welter of introductions and background in the first few pages left me rather confused) - it is very readable.
Competently told from Laurence's viewpoint, with the odd exception of one chapter that details one of Julian's dreams, Speller largely refrains from following the most obvious routes through the story and leaves many threads unfinished.
This is partly because it is the second in a series and more are obviously planned, but I think I prefer it as a stand-alone story; a brief glimpse into lives that extend backwards into the darkness of the past and forwards into a future foreshadowed by the reader's knowledge that worse is yet to come.
22 BRITANNIA ROAD
Amanda Hodgkins
Penguin
The novel opens in the spring of 1946 as a refugee ship carrying a young Polish woman, Sylvana Nowack, and her son Aurek docks in Ipswich, where her husband, Janusz, is waiting for them.
Separated when German forces entered Poland, Janusz escaped and joined the RAF, while Sylvana spent years hiding in the countryside with Aurek, waiting for the fighting to end. Six years and a lifetime of events now stand between them, and they meet as strangers.
Although both want to start afresh (Janusz by creating the perfect English family, Sylvana by finding a father for Aurek), it soon becomes clear that they must come to terms with the past before they can make a future together. But the secrets to be revealed could shatter the fragile new relationship as irreparably as continued silence.
The story alternates between the novelistic present and the events during the war, providing welcome variations in tone, pacing and voice, as well as moments of respite from the bleakness that pervades much of the book.
This is particularly true of Aurek, who retains the capacity to be filled with the woods and sharp smell of spring, and who imagines the bone-lined nests of the kingfisher as tiny, bejewelled palaces.
As a mother, Sylvana's story embodies the worst of nightmares, but some of the imagery stays with me just as strongly; a happy memory for Janusz is "a weakness he savours briefly, sweet and good as a spoonful of sugar in bitter barracks tea", while Aurek imagines splitting into a hundred different boys who could climb every tree and perch up on high "like a great cackle of magpies".
This is a rich and rewarding novel, particularly impressive for being the author's first, and I will be interested to see where she goes next.
• Dr McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.
