An absolutely brilliant book - it moved elegantly between the different times of the story, and featured characters I cared about. Interesting points raised about motherhood, what it means to be a woman, what it means to (not) have found one's place in the world. Highly recommend

As a huge Jessie Burton fan I was so excited to read this book and it did not disappoint!

Rose Simmons has a unfullfilling life and doesnt know her mother who disapeared when she was just a baby. Rose's father gives her a book and tells her the author knew her mother once upon a time so Rose decides to investigate. I loved the two timelines and the stories of two strong and independent women, absolutely recommend! Perfect book to curl up with on a winters day.

This book centres on three women - Elise Morceau, a young woman who falls in love with an author, Constance Holden and her daughter, Rose, who is searching for her mother.

The interplay between Connie and Elise, their lesbian relationship, the strains of one being older and successful, and the other just starting out life with no real purpose, worked quite well.

Rose comes over as unhappy, in a go-nowhere relationship with Joe who has high dreams but little realistic ability to achieve them. Her desire to find her mother, or at least discover what happened to her, are explored as she takes quite a radical step to achieve this. She does come over as quite manipulative and self-centred, even to the end.

I couldn't really identify or sympathise with these characters, who made their choices and then bemoaned the consequences. The book is well-written but didn't really grip me.

Thank you to NetGalley, Pan Macmillan and Picador for allowing me access to the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Jessie Burton's The Confession is a lovely immersive read. Like The Miniaturist, there was something unresolved about the story, something slightly mysterious that made the ending ever so slightly unsatisfying. Somehow, however, that doesn't spoil the overall experience and possibly makes the book more resonant as it worries away at the reader after the book is finished.

When Elise meets Constance sparks fly. Constance is a well-regarded novelist whose book has been optioned by Hollywood, Elise is a drifting student. Elise travels to LA with Constance but as she finds out, things are not always what they seem. Thirty years later Rose is trying to find her mother who left when she was just a baby. The last person connected with her is Constance, now a recluse, so Rose meets her to try and find some answers.
Whilst this is a solid enough book, it does not have the sheer luminosity of earlier works and I found myself struggling at times. I wanted to like it so much more than I did!

This is the first novel I've read by Jessie Burton, and because of her reputation for intricate, rich and almost magical realism historical fiction, I thought this would be a bit dense and perhaps not the easiest read. I was wrong: The Confession is a realist exploration of the journey taken by a woman who's mother left her when she was a baby, and the impact that abandonment made on the woman's development into adulthood. She's trying to solve the mystery of what happened to her mother, while at the same time feeling totally lost herself.

Although slow to start, this was a really enjoyable book, incredibly well written and powerful in a quiet, impactful way.

An overall good read. Very reminiscent of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo but the interviewee doesn't know who her guest is in this book. The fact Constance didn't know made me feel so sorry for her whilst my feelings to the younger woman were much more negative.

Jessie Burton presents us with what seems like an ordinary unique meeting of two people who are attracted to each other, possibly looking for an adventure or love. As a reader I thought I had the measure of this story and felt mildly disappointed. ... And then the rollercoaster took its first plunge on this mysterious, fascinating and enchanting story of a lost girl.
This is a compelling and charming tale of a chance meeting that changes the life of Elise Morceau and sets her on a path of a very different life to the one she believed she had. Having embarked on an unlikely relationship with a best selling author she finds herself transported to a life she feels awkward and uncomfortable in. It is the decision she makes here that sends ripples into her future that a woman named Rose Simmons has to come to terms with.
Themes: mystery, love, relationships, motherhood, loneliness, glamour, intrigue
The structure of this story keeps the reader in anticipation with the descriptive and guiding prose we have already come to expect from this author. I thoroughly enjoyed the compelling glimpses into the past as a way of Rose getting to the truth. The honesty in this book is its integrity. I highly recommend this book by Jessie Burton. This is a must read.
I also recommend The Miniaturist published in 3 July 2014 by Picador.

Jessie Burton is such a talented writer. I have enjoyed all of her books as much for their storylines and writing style, as their diversity.

The Confession is set in the modern day as Rose tries to find information on the mother who abandoned her as a baby, and in the 1980’s as Connie and Elise navigate the imbalances in their relationship. When Elise overheard a conversation while living in LA with Connie, it sets of a catalogue of events that have repercussions for years to come.

I would thoroughly recommend this book and think it would appeal to a wide range of readers who may not have found previous Jessie Burton novels to their taste.

I love Jessie Burton's previous novels and I couldn't wait to read this. However I found it really hard to get into. The 'past' characters are really pretentious and irritating and the present characters have no substance. The journey through the story takes forever and is so descriptive and beautiful in places but in the main is boring. I really wanted to like it, but this novel was not for me.

Rose is looking for her mother. Years after she walked out on her, Rose has found a connection with a famous novelist and goes to get a confession out of her.

Set partly in the 1980s and partly in the present day, the novel explores identity and loss of self. An ok read but didn't really grab me.

This book was fascinating. Extremely well written and brilliantly constructed so that you wanted to know what happened. Once again I was kept up late by a book I needed to finish.
To say it was enjoyable would perhaps be the wrong word as none of the main characters turn out to be very pleasant despite early promise, but it is a really good novel and I'm glad I read it.

After the enormous success of The Miniaturist and The Muse, this is the third novel by Jessie Burton. The Confession is a wonderful story but, apart from the beautiful writing, don't expect it to be anything like The Miniaturist.

The book fluidly moves between the dual narratives of the early 1980s and present day. Rose was abandoned by her mother Elise, as a baby and was brought up by her father. Rose is obviously curious about her mother and after a little heart-to-heart with her father, he gives the name of a well known author Constance Holden, as being in a relationship with Elise in the 1980s. Rose uses duplicitous means to get a job with Constance to hopefully find out more about her mother. The book goes back to when Elise first fell under Connie's spell and follows their relationship to America where Rose was born.

This is a powerful story of complex relationships, emotions and feelings, incredibly well told in the richest of literary words by Jessie Burton.

The Confession is a strangely compelling story about two generations of women - Elise, who in 1980 meets author Connie on Hampstead Heath and embarks on an affair with her, which takes them to Los Angeles and beyond; and her daughter Rosie, who, in 2017, gets a job as help to Connie, in an attempt to find out why Elise abandoned her at the age of 1.

As with the Miniaturist, Jessie Burton has managed to weave the complicated strands of the story together in such a way as to keep the reader interested, even when it gets a little bogged down in the middle. There were times when I was slightly confused about what was happening, but overall this was an interesting book, with a cast of very different characters, acting int similar ways.

Worth a read.

In 1980 Elsie meets Constance on Hampstead Heath, she is a writer who is older and very charismatic, they begin a meaningful and intense relationship. When Constance takes them to L.A as her book is going to be turned into a film, Elsie feels like she has been abandoned, as Constance is too busy for her and expects her to wait on the sidelines.

The story jumps to 2017, Rosie has never known her mother,as she left when she was a child and was raised by her dad Matt. Matt gives her some books and says that her mother knew the author well. Rosie reads the books and decides to try and find Constance the writer so she can hopefully find out where her mother is. She bizarrely uses a different name and becomes Constance’s assistant.

The story alternates between the 2 timelines as we discover what happened to Elsie and will Rosie ever meet her mom.

I was drawn into this book straight away, the characters are very vivid and strong independent women, you want them to have a happy ending. This story encompasses the story of love, relationships, loss in a warm and compassionate way.

I devoured this book in one day and felt like I could have carried on reading about these wonderful characters.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy in exchange for a review.

A cut above Burton’s two previous novels, The Miniaturist and The Muse, and my favorite book cover* of the year. I just wish that she / her publisher hadn’t tried to stick to the pattern of a two-word title starting with ‘The’, as this title feels meaninglessly generic. Yes, there are a couple of important confessions in the book – one is about three-quarters of the way through, when Rose Simmons admits that she’s been masquerading as Laura Brown, an experienced personal assistant, to gain access to Constance Holden, a reclusive writer and her mother Elise’s former lover; another is when Connie admits to Rose the role she played in Elise’s disappearance when Rose was a baby – but I still feel it’s not evocative enough as titles go.

In any case, Burton handles her two timelines very well. In the first few years of the 1980s, Elise and Connie meet and set up a tentative life together, with Elise even accompanying Connie to Los Angeles for the shoot of a film adaptation of her first novel, Wax Heart. But California is also where they fall apart, drifting off to be with other people; it’s where Elise meets Rose’s father.

In 2017–18, Rose feels lost. She’s 34 and still hasn’t figured out what she wants out of life in terms of a career, a partner and possible motherhood (“by thirty-five, you ought to have it sorted,” she feels). Looking for the mother she never knew seems to have sapped all of her creative energy. In burrowing into Connie’s life she’s looking not just for her mother, but for herself. The two choices she makes at the end of the book struck me as wrong – wrong for me, at least – and yet I can see why in the world of the book that is how things had to be.

This is probably a longer book than it needs to be, yet I only felt myself chafing at the length in the last few chapters – I’d been perfectly happy to read 20 or 25 pages per day to get it back to the public library within the few-week deadline. So Burton kept me under her spell for pretty much the whole book, even if the story could have been dispatched in more like 300 pages than 450.

What will stick with me is the sense of societal pressure on both Elise and Rose, and how they both flout these expectations, for better or worse. I’ve felt Rose’s self-pity – shouldn’t I have more of a proper life by my mid-thirties? – and Elise’s temptation to just drop it all and leave, to not do what everyone else expects of me. Like Expectation, this is a book that will resonate for a lot of women, especially those in their twenties and thirties in this case.

*It is partially inspired by the title of Connie’s second novel, Green Rabbit.

A novel by Jessie Burton is always a thing of pleasure, unusual story telling coupled with skilful writing. The Confession is about many things, primarily it is about what it means to grow up without a mother’s figure to guide and offer unconditional love.

Back in 1980s Hampstead, Elise and Connie are embarking on a lesbian relationship, a time when it was not easy to be openly gay. Connie has a film contract for one of her novels and both women fly over to Hollywood and settle there. Elise never really knew her mother, as she died when she was 9 years old. Connie, as an older woman, offers her the parental figure for which Elise craves. At first the balance of their relationship works well.

Within a short time unconsciously Elise has split their situation into Connie having everything – the success, the friends, the confidence, the talent – and Elise trailing along with nothing. Gradually she shifts into adaptive and ‘victim’ child mode and sets about having a relationship with someone in Connie’s circle. She can justify this action because she overheard something that spurs her into destructive behaviour.

Move forward to present day Hampstead and Connie has long since returned from the frivolous West Coast and is living on her own. Her hands have become decrepit and she seeks an assistant who arrives in the form of Rose. Rose purports to be someone called Laura who is in fact Elise’s daughter and she feels she needs to be deceptive and adopt this cloak and dagger scenario. Rose has such a strong desire to connect – somehow – with her mother, who she never really knew, and Connie seems like a good starting point. Rose/Laura now spends her life weighed down by the deceit she has set in motion, waiting to be caught out at any moment. Elise, you see, abandoned Rose when she was just a baby and left no trace as to her whereabouts, then or since.

Thus, there are two generations of women growing up without a mother. This is a novel of relationships, of maternal bonds and lack thereof and how one can cling to what one has lost. Yet, the narrative is as much about loss and yearning as it is about choices that can be made for a more positive future. One can reframe one’s life in a positive way and value the elements that one does have… and over time and through pregnancy, Rose indeed starts to adjust. Echoes of events and people appear in Connie’s books, paintbrush sweeps of hinted relationships do leave Rose wondering how much is fiction, how much is based on real life…. (the cover of the book refers to the title of one of Connie’s novels).

There are harsh words and consequences with Connie having pivotal relationships with both mother and daughter. She is an unforgiving woman, soft at times, focussed on herself and yet, she is nevertheless a sympathetic character. In the early days she tries to coax Elise into better mothering by haranguing her – citing her mother’s brain tumour and concomitant mental deterioration as a sign of poor mothering, brought on by daughter Elise’s behaviour and character – which ultimately sounded like a desperate yet futile attempt at motivation….

I felt the relationships between the characters sometimes felt a little lacklustre and flat (sorry!). It’s almost as though the author started out forming the characters with great enthusiasm and insight, got them involved in the plot and then lost a bit of inspiration and moved on to the next scene. In no way a deal breaker, it’s a great piece of fiction and had me absorbed from the get-go. Recommended.

This was such a powerful novel, a truly intriguing and intelligent book, with a solid storyline and strong characters. I enjoyed Jessie Burtons previous books, but I absolutely loved this one.

This story is gripping from the first with a writing style I loved. An absolute celebration of a book. I was totally convinced by the characters and found every scene engaging. I would highly recommend this title for its pace and timing. A must read in my opinion.

This is the story of three women. Rose Simmons, her mother Elise Morceau and Constance Holden. Rose has been brought up by her father and she was abandoned by her mother when she was a baby. She is in her 30s and quite dissatisfied with her life so, when her father tells her that her mother knew the now reclusive author Constance, she decides to try and get in touch with her to see if she knows anything about her mother’s disappearance. The story is told from both Elise and Rose's perspective and we gradually discover why Elise abandoned her baby daughter. A very enjoyable tale.