To be published May 20th 2021…
Joe Tournier steps off a train in London. His ticket shows that he came from Edinburgh, but he doesn’t remember ever having been there and he doesn’t remember getting on the train or a single minute of the journey itself. Actually he doesn’t remember anything. All he knows is his name, Joe Tournier, and a vague memory that he has a wife called Madeline. According to the doctor his memory loss is a caused by a very common type of epilepsy, although he does seem to have a rather severe case of it. When his wife Alice comes to collect him from the hospital, armed with photos of their wedding day, there doesn’t seem to be much else to do but try to get on with life as much as he can; moving forward into his future even if he’s forgotten is past. Then a postcard arrives, apparently having been waiting at the post office for one hundred years. It shows an eerily familiar lighthouse and is signed ‘m’.
What follows is a very complicated, somewhat fragmented, and very intense journey to the truth. The artful mystery and interwoven timelines in this book kept me hooked and constantly guessing from beginning to end. Even the ending held its own a fast-paced, heart-thumping intrigue. By the time the full truth was revealed I felt as though I already knew it, yet at the same time my mind is, even now, frantically working to unravel all the loose threads and join them up together.
Time travel, in whatever form it takes, is always an immensely tricky challenge to get right, but it is a challenge that Natasha Pulley has achieved with genius. The changes, small and big, between various timelines are made clear without feeling like they have been shoehorned in and the idea of memory loss fills in the gaps in an enticing way. Even the method of time-travel, although never fully explained, is beautiful in its simplicity and the setting for it is described in perfectly intricate detail.
As always, Natasha Pulley’s characters are fully three-dimensional (in some cases maybe even more than that) and they each have their own quirks that make each character uniquely interesting and fully loveable. The many sides of Joe Tournier are obviously very interesting to explore, especially as the gaps in his memory are slowly filled in. However, it is the character of Kite Missouri which sticks in my mind. Whilst reading, I felt myself constantly drawn towards him and then alternately repelled, like a magnet that keeps switching poles. He’s a character that you really want to love, but keep feeling like you shouldn’t; where every positive action is marred by a negative but then overruled again by an even bigger positive. The constant losses and gains that this novel is built on make for an emotional rollercoaster of a read, but one that I would happily read again and again whilst looking forward to discovering something new each time.
Escape to the Bookshelf 