RATING: 5/5
BLURB: “When Frances’ best friend, Bronwyn, disappeared over twenty years ago, her body was never found. And in that moment Frances’s life changed forever.
Now it’s 1942 and bombs are raining down on Bath. In the chaos a little boy goes missing. Frances was meant to be looking after him and she is tortured by guilt at his disappearance. Where has he gone, and is there any chance he could have survived?
Bombs conceal, but they can also reveal – as quiet falls and the dust settles, a body is disturbed from its hiding place. What happened to Bronwyn all those years ago? And can Frances ever put right the wrongs of the past…?”
REVIEW: I’ve had a bit of a hectic time lately as will soon be moving house so have been a bit lax with posting, but after reading this book I knew I immediately had to sit down and write about just how incredible it is. Any long-term followers of this blog will know that Katherine Webb is one of my all-time favourite authors, and her novels have more than once been listed as my top book of the year. I was so excited when I found out she had released ‘The Disappearance’, and have just sat and read it in a solid three-hour block (when I probably should have been packing, oops).
The story is told from the perspective of Frances Parry, a thirty-two year old woman who has recently returned home to her parents in Bath after the breakdown of her marriage. It is 1942 and Bath is hit badly by the Blitz, as is Frances herself. A young boy named Davy, whom she looks after, goes missing after a night of bombs raining down on the town, and then the body of her best friend, missing for over twenty years, is uncovered in the wreckage.
Frances has mixed memories of the time that Bronwyn went missing, when they were both only eight years old, and the story flashes between the present day and the year of 1918 as she tries to remember what really happened. An Austrian prisoner of war, Johannes Ebner, was convicted and hanged for Bronwyn’s murder at the time of her disappearance, but as Frances delves further into her memories of the case, she becomes increasingly convinced that Johannes was innocent, and that Bronwyn’s killer still looms large. At the same time as this is going on, Frances is also desperately continuing her search for Davy, the son of Bronwyn’s alcoholic sister Carys, and finding herself rekindling past feelings for Bronwyn’s brother, Owen.
As always with Webb’s books, there are so many twists and turns that I won’t go into any more detail for fear of spoiling the climax of the novel. Hints are littered throughout the book, both in the past and present sections, as to who Bronwyn’s real killer was, but the revelation is still shocking. It is also dealt with very sensitively, as of course the abuse and murder of children is something we distressingly read about far too frequently in the news of today, and Webb is consistently mindful of this in the way she writes. The characters are written in depth, layered and very well-written, and the description of the setting – including the way in which certain smells and sensations can evoke buried memories – was very vivid and captured the imagination. I was absolutely hooked from beginning to end, so absorbed in the book that I even felt a little fuzzy for a while afterwards! I have already recommended it to several people and commend Webb, once again, on writing such an amazing novel.
Coffee, Books and Paris 