Book review: The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

A long-lost letter sets Edie Burchill on a collision course with events from her mother’s past...

Buried secrets from the Second World War are unearthed and relationships changed forever in Kate Morton’s hauntingly beautiful novel centred upon a decaying castle in Kent.

Morton is an intelligent and perceptive writer and her two previous novels, The House at Riverton and The Forgotten Garden, became instant bestsellers.

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The Distant Hours, an almost dream-like meditation on the dramas and dilemmas that beset families of every generation, takes her storytelling powers to a new and impressive level.

The action weaves between the war years and the early 1990s but the gothic atmosphere of mouldering Milderhurst Castle and its eccentric occupants lend her elegant and elegiac story a tantalisingly timeless quality.

Edie is a bookish sort of woman...she grew up reading Victorian novels by torchlight in her bedroom and now works as an editor for a small publishing house in London.

When her mother, Meredith, receives a 50-year-old letter with the return address of Milderhurst Castle on the envelope, Edie learns that Meredith was evacuated there as a 13-year-old girl in 1940.

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But her mother, with whom she has never been close, is distressed by the letter and Edie begins to suspect that wartime events could hold the key to their emotional distance.

When fate draws Edie to the dilapidated castle, she meets the three elderly, spinster Blythe sisters whose father, Raymond Blythe, wrote the classic children’s horror story, The True History of the Mud Man, way back in 1917.

Blythe had an unhappy history – two wives who died in tragic circumstances and a mother who jumped to her death from a castle tower – and in his later years, he was convinced that his Stygian creation, the Mud Man, had come back to torment him

Juniper, the youngest of his daughters, now spends her days steeped in melancholy madness which her twin sisters claim is due to the disappearance of her fiancé, Thomas Cavill, in 1941.

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As Edie embarks on a journey of discovery in which she seeks out the ‘distant hours’ in an almost trance-like state, we too travel back to wartime and witness the slow unravelling of a story that involves lost love, thwarted ambition, menace, madness and murder.

Morton maintains a wistful of air of nostalgia and mystery throughout this intriguing story, drawing her readers to the edge of a precipice over which we know there awaits some terrible truth.

Through the clever use of words and imagery, imagination and suspense, The Distant Hours moves inexorably to a compelling climax.

Morton at her very best...

(Mantle, hardback, £16.99)

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