Published By: Macmillan
Pages: 448
Released On: 05/03/2026
When Hope finds her real life in the pages of a bestselling novel, truth and fiction become blurred.
As a young woman, Hope’s dreams are as aspirational as her name. Curious and beautiful, she lands a job working for an up-and-coming author at his Somerset home. Drawn into the orbit of a glamorous bohemian elite, she quickly falls under the spell of this exotic world, which revolves around Ambrose Glencourt, his artist wife and their semi-adopted son, Tom.
But her time with them ends in a fatal disaster. She has kept the truth of those events a secret ever since.
Ten years on, Hope lives a lonely life that she has accepted not just as penance for what she did, but also to protect Ambrose. Except he hasn’t upheld his side of the bargain and is using her story in his new novel. And he has a very different tale to tell about what happened that summer . . .
But which one of them is a reliable narrator? And at what cost do you take control of the narrative of your own life?
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I read Araminta’s book One of the Good Guys, and whilst I thought it was okay, I wasn’t overly enamoured by it. But I never give up on an author after one book and this one sounded intriguing.
There’s a sort of he-said-she-said vibe about it, who to trust, who to believe, which I found interesting.
It’s a relatively small cast of characters and they’re not all likeable. This will sound weird but go with it. There seemed to be a lot about them, lots of detail and whatnot, and yet at the same time they felt really distant and I just didn’t care about any of them.
My main issue with it was that it was too long. I love a detailed book and detail can obviously make a book interesting, but there were moments where I felt like she was writing all this detail just to reach a word count, rather than because it was necessary for the plot. Having said that, it didn’t feel as slow as I expected it to. I refer books 300-400 pages, so at nearly 450 I thought this would drag, but it did flow quite well, at least to begin with, and it did start to dwindle as it went on.
It is the epitome of a psychological thriller and whilst it wasn’t perfect, there were some good bits. But it is too long, too detail heavy, with questionable characters, but parts of it were engaging and intriguing and it did pass quicker than I thought.
I’m still not sure if she’s an author for me. Both books have been…..just okay. I probably would try one more but I may have to accept that she’s just not for me.
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