This week we are recommending The Book of Summers by Emylia Hall
Beth Lowe has been sent a parcel. Inside is a letter
informing her that her long-estranged mother has died, and a scrapbook which Beth has
never seen before. Entitled The Book of Summers, it's stuffed with photographs
and mementos complied by her mother to record the seven glorious childhood
summers Beth spent in rural Hungary. It was a time when she trod the tightrope
between separated parents and two very different countries; her bewitching but
imperfect Hungarian mother and her gentle, reticent English father; the
dazzling house of a Hungarian artist and an empty-feeling cottage in deepest
Devon. And it was a time that came to the most brutal of ends the year Beth
turned sixteen. Since then, Beth hasn't allowed herself to think about those
years of her childhood. But the arrival of The Book of Summers brings the past
tumbling back into the present; as vivid, painful and vital as ever.
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