The Secrets Of Rochester Place by Iris Costello

 

The Secrets of Rochester Place by Iris Costello.

Published 24th November 2022 by Penguin.

From the cover of the book:

Spring 1937: Teresa, a young Basque girl, is evacuated to London in the wake of the Guernica bombing. She thinks she has reached safety in the lofty halls of Rochester Place and the soothing arms of Mary Davidson, but trouble seeks her out wherever she goes...

Autumn 2020: Corrine, an emergency services operator, receives a call from a distressed woman called Mary. But when the ambulance arrives at Rochester Place - the address the woman gave them - she is nowhere to be found. No matter how hard she tries to forget, memories of Mary's raw fear haunt Corinne and secrets, long-hidden in Corinne's family tree, begin to surface.

Is Mary calling from beyond the grave? And what actually happened at Rochester Place all those years ago?

Set between the dusty halls of Rochester Place and the bustling streets of modern-day Tooting, this emotive, intricately layered mystery tells the spellbinding story of two people, separated by time, yet mysteriously connected through an enchanting Georgian house and the secrets within its walls. The perfect escapist read for fans of Kate Morton, Eve Chase and Lulu Taylor.

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London 1937: A young Basque girl called Teresa is evacuated to London in the wake of the destruction of Guernica, during the Spanish Civil War. Fearing she will never see her sister again, she finds a home with Mary and her husband at the faded Georgian grandeur of Rochester Place. But war has not yet finished with Teresa.

London, 2020. When Corinne, an emergency services operator, receives a distressing call from a woman called Mary, desperately pleading for help, she has no idea that it will open up a mystery surrounding a place that she never knew existed in her Tooting neighbourhood - for when the ambulance crew arrive at Rochester Place, all they find is a long neglected garden, with no house in sight.

As Corinne begins to look into the mystery, she learns about the history of Rochester Place and the fate of its inhabitants Mary and Teresa, during World War II. Can it be possible that she received a message from beyond the grave? There are secrets to be uncovered here, and little does she know that some of them lead back to the history of her own family.

This is a beautifully contrived time-slip mystery that moves back and forth between wartime and modern day Tooting. The wartime thread brings alive the tales of Teresa, a refugee child from the Spanish Civil War, and Mary, an Irish emigrée who has made London her home under unusual circumstances. In parallel, we follow the thread of Corinne's life in the present, as she uncovers the secrets of Rochester Place to discover that they relate to her own family's past.

Costello beautifully echoes a number of themes around family, identity, bigotry, and rebellion, through both timelines, bleeding them together with the use of delicious evocative scenes, places, and items from the past, in and around Rochester Place. She does not shy away from the horrors of war, and the human toll that comes with it - including suspicion, hatred, and misplaced revenge, but there is a lot of love too. Everything weaves together seamlessly, fully investing you in the triumphs and troubles of the characters in the past and the present. For most of the story, you cannot see where this is going, but gradually the threads come together in a lovely ending that ties them all together with a gorgeous bow of reconciliation, understanding and forgiveness that brought a lump to my throat and a tear to my eye.

One of my favourite things about this book is the way Costello underlies the modern strand of the story with a whisper of the supernatural, and how the lives that have come before can seep into the fabric of the buildings left behind. There is something of the ghost story about this that gives it an enchanting extra dimension, and she plays with this very cleverly in how those ghosts are laid to rest at the conclusion of the tale.

I read this book in a single glorious sitting. It celebrates love, survival, and the strength of the human spirit - especially women. It is the perfect read for those who adore compelling historical fiction that ties elegantly into the present, in a way that teaches you a thing or two about the circular nature of history. 

The Secrets of Rochester Place is available to buy now in paperback, ebook and audio formats.

Thank you to Penguin for sending me a proof of this book in return for an honest review, and for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the author:

Iris Costello is the pseudonym of Nuala Ellwood, who was born in 1979. She has a BA Hons degree in Sociology from Durham University and a Master's in Creative Writing from York St John University where she is a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing. The author of six highly acclaimed novels, Nuala has a teenage son, Luke, and is based in York and South London.