The Beloved Girls by Harriet Evans
BY SUMMER'S END, THERE WILL BE ONLY ONE . . .
'It's a funny old house. They have this ceremony every summer . . . There's an old chapel, in the grounds of the house. Half-derelict. The Hunters keep bees in there. Every year, on the same day, the family processes to the chapel. They open the combs, taste the honey. Take it back to the house. Half for them -' my father winced, as though he had bitten down on a sore tooth. 'And half for us.'
Catherine, a successful barrister, vanishes from a train station on the eve of her anniversary. Is it because she saw a figure - someone she believed long dead? Or was it a shadow cast by her troubled, fractured mind?
The answer lies buried in the past.
It lies in the events of the hot, seismic summer of 1989, at Vanes - a mysterious West Country manor house - where a young girl, Jane Lestrange, arrives to stay with the gilded, grand Hunter family, and where a devastating tragedy will unfold. Over the summer, as an ancient family ritual looms closer, Janey falls for each member of the family in turn. And she and Kitty, the eldest daughter of the house, will forge a bond that decades later, is still shaping the present . . .
'We need the bees to survive, and they need us to survive. Once you understand that, you understand the history of Vanes, you understand our family.'
About the author
Harriet Evans has sold over a million copies of
her books. She is the author of twelve bestselling novels, most recently the Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller The Garden of Lost and Found, which won Good Housekeeping's Book of the Year, and The Wildflowers, which was a Richard & Judy Book Club selection. She used to work in publishing and now writes full time, when she is not being distracted by her children, other books, crafting projects, puzzles, gardening, and her much-loved collection of jumpsuits. She lives in Bath, Somerset.
Review
Wow, was this book stunning or what? It stole my heart and never gave it back. I have a serious book hangover. It was a mesmerising gothic tale of an outsider looking into a messed up family! With the addition of the yearly ritual with the bees, it rises this tale up to an epic story of passions, traditions, abuse, and most importantly love. That of a father, mother, partner and friend.
Janey and Kitty are the beloved girls. Janey has just lost her father and is staying with some old family friends, the Hunters, on the edge of Exmoor in a crumbling house. There is Slyvia who was an old friend of Janey’s father, her husband Charles and their children, twins Joss and Kitty and younger sister Merry. To Janey, the Hunters have the perfect existence - the family she never had. On the edge of the grounds, there is a chapel where thousands of bees have made their home for centuries and every year a ceremony is conducted to give thanks and remove some of the honey. Janey and Kitty are to take part as the beloved girls - to represent purity.
Then we have present-day Catherine - a lawyer who has it all. A beautiful family, a great career but why then does she go missing from St Pancreas station when she was meant to be going on holiday with her husband? Catherine has secrets of her own and is running away from them…
This book has a beautiful sense of foreboding claustrophobia that emerges from the start and never releases you from its grip. It reminded me in this way of ‘Rebecca’ and the setting of the big house, spacious grounds added to this effect. It's a dark book but exquisitely written and due to this you don't want to stop reading it as it has beauty and love at its core. The book leaps between different timeframes and voices bur this only adds to the intrigue and mystery as it makes you question everything twice or thrice and then when it clicks you are left stunned.
You NEED to read this one!
