Jubilee by Eliza Graham

Jubilee by Eliza Graham
Buy Jubilee by Eliza Graham at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: General Fiction
Reviewer: Sue Magee
Summary: I read through the night until the sun was coming up to finish Jubilee: it was worth it.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 304	Date: June 2010
Publisher: Pan
ISBN: 978-0330509268
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As the village celebrates the Queen's Golden Jubilee two people can't help but think back to the Silver Jubilee. Evie Winter and her niece Rachel have vivid memories of the day when Evie's daughter Jessamy wandered off and the mystery of her disappearance has never been solved. She was eleven years old, bright, athletic and loved by her mother and cousin. There would seem to be no explanation as to why she might have disappeared of her own free will and no evidence that she was abducted. Life has carried on, but it has not been the same. It has not been easy.

Not long after the Golden Jubilee celebrations Rachel hears that her aunt has, most unexpectedly, died of heart problems and she has to return to Winter's Copse to settle her aunt's estate. The story which she unravels there will change the lives of everyone involved. It didn't begin on that day a quarter of a century before but back in the Second World War when Evie and her twin Charlie came to the farm as evacuees and Robert and Matthew Winter, the men who ran the farm, went to fight for King and Country, but ended up in a Japanese Prisoner of War Camp.

As a reviewer I do my best not to have favourites but there are a handful of authors whose books arrive and I know that the temptation to put everything else aside and indulge myself will be just too much. I just had a peep at Jubilee yesterday evening and finished it as the sky began to lighten in the early hours of this morning. I found it a little hard to get into at first as the narrative jumps in time and place, but once I worked out who was who the changes became seamless and I was incapable of putting the book down.

Eliza Graham first snared me with Playing With The Moon and then Restitution, but I think Jubilee is her best work so far. There's a common theme of war running through the books, but they're all very different. Jubilee illustrates that dreadful as war might be the aftermath visits itself on those who fought and those around them – sometimes for generations to come. It's a story of unrequited love and the quiet glory of the English countryside.

I'd like to thank the author for sending a copy to the Bookbag.

If this book appeals then you might also enjoy The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield or The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell.

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