Selected Poems
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Paul Farley is now widely recognized as one of the leading English poets writing today. Selected...
Two Women in Rome
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A beautifully atmospheric new tale from the prize-winning, bestselling novelist Elizabeth Buchan. ...
Historical fiction Italy Rome
The Thousand Emperors
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MUST HE DIE TO KNOW THE TRUTH? Archivist Luc Gabion is dying, slowly, victim of a forced technology...
Mobile Library
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Twelve-year-old Bobby Nusku is an archivist of his mother. He catalogues traces of her life and...
Missing Reels
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New York in the late 1980s. Ceinwen Reilly has just moved from Yazoo City, Mississippi, and she's...
Curating Oral Histories: From Interview to Archive
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The interview is completed, the recorder packed away, and you've captured the narrator's voice for...
A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die by The Flesh Eaters
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Digitally remastered edition of this 1981 Post-Punk classic. The Flesh Eaters is the name behind one...
ClareR (5721 KP) rated The Imposter in Books
Mar 7, 2023
Newspaper archivist Chloe is the sole carer of her grandmother who has dementia. She’s trying to fend off social services to keep her Nan at home - she’s all she has, after all.
It’s no surprise to me that Chloe develops an obsession with a past case that she comes across whilst digitalising old articles. Angela Kyle went missing as a 4 year old in 1980. Chloe tracks down the child’s parents, discovers they need a lodger, and gets the room when Nan has been moved into a home.
This is a sad book. Chloe’s nan’s dementia; Angela’s parents living with their loss and not knowing what happened to their child; Chloe’s obsession and loneliness. These are all strong, well-thought out characters - and it’s so tense! I felt like I needed to come up regularly for air!
It’s emotional, and the ending is absolutely plausible - it’s a cracking story!!
ClareR (5721 KP) rated Two Women in Rome in Books
Jun 15, 2021
Lottie also finds Nina’s journal in her personal effects, and the more of it she reads, the more she wants to find out about her life.
I loved the details about Rome in both timelines - I’ve visited Rome and loved it. The strong female characters were also a big plus point for me. Lottie is a head archivist, she really knows what she’s doing and is confident in her abilities. Nina is also an assertive woman - she is often in new situations that many would find themselves floundering in (Ok, that sounds really vague, but I don’t want to give anything away!)
This is a book about secrets: about keeping them, and what happens when they are revealed - both good and bad. This isn’t a book that goes fast and hard in its revelations. Quite opposite in fact, and probably why I liked it so much. I love a well told story, and I really felt that I knew the women in this because of that feeling of not being rushed through the story.
There’s a fair amount of Italian politics in this, some of which I had never known about, so that was another plus point. I hadn’t realised that Italy had had quite such a tumultuous political life for so long after World War Two. The novel has a great mix of themes, actually: secrets, history, politics, life in Rome, betrayal, guilt. I think I’m becoming a bit of an Elizabeth Buchan fan because I really enjoyed her last book The Museum of Broken Promises, as well. Both books are set in Europe, with the aftereffects of great political upheavals, ostensibly going back to World War Two. This book is well worth reading - I’d definitely recommend it.
Many thanks to The Pigeonhole and NetGalley for my copy of this book.