Friday, 3 May 2024

Sea Defences by Hilary Taylor

From Goodreads

‘Poetry in prose. Astutely observed’ Fiona Erskine Rachel.

A trainee vicar struggling to bond with her flock in the coastal town of Holthorpe, learns the terrifying power of the North Sea when her six-year-old daughter goes missing on the beach. Meanwhile Mary, a defiant and distrustful loner, is fighting her own battle against nature as the crumbling Norfolk shoreline brings her clifftop home ever closer to destruction. Both scarred by life, the two women are drawn into an unlikely friendship, but Mary’s misfit son Adam is nursing a secret. For Rachel, it will subject her battered faith to its greatest will she be strong enough to forgive? In her taut, lyrical debut novel, Hilary Taylor weaves the bleak power of the East Anglian winter into a searingly honest psychological drama, as gripping as any thriller.

My thoughts

I found this book via BorrowBox the digital lending side of my local Library, I am not sure what drew me to it, but I am glad that I found it.

This is a slow burner of a read that engages with the reader, keeping you turning the pages as you try to find out what has happened to the missing young daughter of the trainee vicar and what is going on with the characters as the story progresses.  

The area that the story is set in, I found to be every bit as much of a character to the story as the characters themselves.  I enjoyed the story and will be looking out for more books by this author in the future.

This would make a great reading group read.

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