Great read. Told from two characters perspective’s and in two different timeframes, chapters skip back and forth between the two. This is a fast paced book that keeps you turning the pages.
Typical clever Nuala Ellwood writing that’s intriguing, topical and delivers some great twists at the end
Really rate this lady’s books

A great read. I enjoyed reading it and it has a great plot and characters. I also look forward to more books from the author.

As much as I have loved other books by Nuala Ellwood, I felt somewhat cheated by this one. I don’t know if it was because it didn’t end the way I had imagined. It was still a good story and one I would recommend, hence the 4 stars.

The story is told from two main characters points of view - Grace (or Soldier one) from the early 2000s and Lisa from the present day - Grace previously lived and grew up in the house on the lake and Lisa and her young son are seeking refuge there after she ran away from her controlling husband.

Grace had lived with her father an ex-SAS man who clearly had done form of PTSD. She had no friends and spent all day every day with her father until one day she met Isobel, the minister’s daughter.

Lisa and her four year old son are holed up in the abandoned old house on the lake hiding from her ex. I did think that if Lisa was in hiding she might have had a backstory ready and a change of names to try to protect her identity but then again given the circumstances she maybe wasn’t thinking straight.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced read copy of this book in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

As always with an Ellwood read, you are straight away lost in her capability to create drama and unfathomable plots. This leaving you craving more and needing to submerge in every single word on the page on a deep and fascinating level.

The House on the Lake is not what I was expecting for some reason. It was a lot softer than previous books by the author and gave a different vibe. It makes for an easier and faster read, but still gives you the grit and bite you need and want.

One for your 2020 TBR and bookshelf for sure.
It is one eerily beautiful read.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
5/5

The House on the Lake is a suspenseful thriller by Nuala Ellwood.
The story is told from the point of view of Lisa, in the present and Grace in the past. Lisa needs to run away with her three-year-old son, Joe and her friend’s remote and rundown house in Yorkshire seems like the perfect place to hide.
What is Lisa willing to do to protect her son and keep the two of them together?
What secrets hide in the past of this old and dilapidated house and what stories could it tell?

I love a story where the setting becomes a character in its own right. Rowan Isle House achieves this perfectly. It becomes both a sanctuary, a safe place for Lisa and her son but also an ominous and creepy environment where danger lurks in the shadows.
The characters are complex and well-developed each with an intriguing back story of their own. The story twists and turns towards an ending that I did not see coming. Every time I thought I knew where the story was headed, who I needed to watch out for something would happen to throw my ideas out of the water. It kept me guessing and I love that!
I enjoyed reading this book immensely and definitely recommend!
Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book in return for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this book. Lisa and her little boy Joe arrive at the house on the lake, having been given the details by a friend. However, the house is in a terrible state of repair with no electricity or running water. Lisa doesn't care - she is anxious that her husband won't be able to find her. Told in a time frame 20 years earlier, young teenager Grace lives with her father, who is an Iraqi war veteran, and is clearly suffering from PTSD. The story unravels to the connection between Lisa and Grace, and there are some good twists. Thanks to NetGalley for a preview copy.
Copied to Goodreads.

I enjoyed this book, although found it a bit slow to begin with. I didn't really like that the chapters jumped back and forth from Lisa and her son, to a story years ago about Grace and her soldier father. Takes till the end of the book to work out the connection. Having said this, it was a good storyline, and I enjoyed the ending.

This is the first book I have read by Nuala Ellwood. It was very good. I would enjoy reading more books that she writes in the future.

This book follows Lisa who is running away from her husband with her young son. Her friend told her about an old house by a lake in a remote time. Lisa thinks that she will be safe from her husband there however she soon discovers that this house contains secrets and she may not be as safe as she first thought. Alongside Lisa's story, we also see a young girl who used to live in this house with her father who seems to be suffering from PTSD or something similar. They live like survivalists and have very little interaction with others.

It took me a while to get into this story. Whilst I found the stories interesting I wasn't sure how they were going to link together. This is certainly a slow-moving thriller.

The stories do eventually link together but I did feel underwhelmed by the conclusion. Whilst the majority of the book moves quite slowly the last portion of the book felt a little rushed to me.

This was a page turner of a thriller that I could not put down. I loved it. It was fast paced that held my attention from the very start. I have loved all this author’s books and can not wait for the next one. Highly recommended. Five stars from me

Many thanks to netgalley and Nuala Ellwood for the advanced copy of this book. I agreed to give my unbiased opinion voluntarily.

Amazing book. Kept me gripped from start to finish.
I really enjoyed how the story jumped back & forth.
The ending came as a total surprise to me. The whole book kept my interest from start to finish.

This is the first book I have read by this author, and I think I would have appreciated this book more if I had read the other titles. A compelling read, the author captures a Gothic atmosphere, great characterization,, good story. Recommended.

I loved this book and couldn't put it Down. A well thought out plot and believable characters. I would highlr recommend this book to other readers.

This is a very atmospheric dark thriller in a brilliantly dark setting. There are two stories running parallel throughout and they knit together really well.
One part is about Lisa and her small son Joe who has came to the house on the lake to escape something although the reader is not exactly sure what that is to begin with. Lisa is certainly scared and has ran away from something or someone.
The other part is about Grace, a young girl who lives with her eccentric father in the house on the lake. Graces life is very unusual for a young girl she has no friends and her and her father are outcasts that hunt in the surrounding woods.
As the story reveals itself it becomes clear how the two are entwined as secrets and truths are enfolded. A gritty dark book.

Right from the start it was impossible to put the book down and I was drawn into the story of Lisa and her little boy Joey. There are twists and turns along the way, making this one of the books staying with me for a long time.

Lisa is on the run from her controlling husband Mark along with her 3 year old son Joe who doesn’t seem to be very happy about it. She is set to stay at Rowan Isle House, an old abandoned house given to her by her in case she needed a safe place. But the house is nothing like she thought. For instance, there is no electricity nor any other basic facilities for that matter. It seems impossible to live in such a house in the modern day without any amenities present. But Lisa can’t afford to go anywhere else, can she?

On the other hand, we get to meet Grace whose story dates back to 2002 when she was 11 years old living in Rowan Isle with her soldier father. Isolated from the public eye without any human intervention, Grace’s childhood is devoid of any emotions except fear and curiosity.

These two timelines run side-by-side and I just cannot stop myself from turning the pages faster and faster. The curiosity and suspense keeps building and its impossible to put the book down! I personally loved the character of Grace, especially her childhood descriptions brought me fresh tears. There wasn’t much time to know Lisa better, as her past isn’t as furnished as Grace’s and I couldn’t give her the expected level of sympathy.

I’ve been reading a lot of domestic thrillers lately where a wife runs away from her abusive husband and tries to live a new life stealthily. Although, the plot is very similar here, it’s more of Grace’s story than Lisa’s. When the two plots collide, that’s when the magic happens. ‘The House on the Lake’ is a total package with it’s pacy, short n crips chapters gripping the reader till the very last page. I can’t recommend the book enough to all my fellow thriller fans who’d love a pacy mystery to binge read

Lisa is on the run from an abusive relationship with her husband. She takes her young son Joe and flees. Someone told her that Rowan Isle House would be a safe haven for them, and she has nowhere else to go. But when she gets there the house is a wreck - no electricity, no water, it's obviously been abandoned for years. Lisa has no idea what to do now.

There is another side to the story - the previous occupants of the house. A young girl and her father. He is a soldier, and they live off the land. She doesn't go to school, but learns how to hunt and how to defend herself. She also learns that when her father is yelling at ghosts it's best to stay out of his way. But what happened to them? The house has clearly been empty for a long time, so where did they go? This is what is revealed slowly throughout the book, as Lisa tries to cope with Joe, who just wants his Daddy to come and get him. It's Lisa's biggest fear that he will.

This was an interesting book to read. It's very vague to start off with, and the details of both stories are slowly brought together until you have the full picture right at the end. I've read a book by the author, Nuala Ellwood before, The Day of the Accident, and enjoyed that, so I had an idea what to expect. That book was similarly mysterious, with a revelation at the end.

I liked the fact that the two main characters, Lisa and the girl who lived in the house before, are so different. I was definitely more invested in the story of the girl and her soldier father. It was quite a unique idea, and I was intrigued to know what would happen to them, especially since I knew they weren't still living happily in that house by the lake.

I would recommend this book, probably mainly to fans of women's literature and dramas with a hint of mystery.

My thanks to Penguin Books U.K. for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘The House on the Lake’ by Nuala Ellwood in exchange for an honest review. It was published in February 2020. My apologies for the late feedback.

I borrowed its audiobook edition, read by Georgia May-Foote, from my local e-library and listened alongside reading the eARC.

Given that this is a work of suspense I won’t go into much detail about the plot to avoid spoilers. As the title indicates the novel takes place at a house on a lake.

Lisa has left her controlling husband and needs to disappear. She was offered the use of a house in an isolated part of Yorkshire by a friend. When she and her three-year old son, Joe, turns up at Rowan Isle House she finds that it is not fit for habitation. It’s filthy with no electricity or running water.

Still Lisa is desperate and tries to make them comfortable. Then Isobel, a woman from the local village comes to visit and tells Lisa of the secrets that the house holds, making Lisa feel less safe.

The novel has two narrators in separate timelines: Lisa in December 2018 and then back in 2002-04 Soldier/Grace, who lives there with her father, Sarge. He is a Gulf War veteran suffering from PTSD and he treats his eleven-year old daughter as if she’s in the military.

I did find Joe particularly annoying and even more so with the audiobook narration where his whining and tantrums were brought vividly to life. The house itself was atmospheric and there’s no way I would have stayed there.

I thought that Ellwood used some interesting ways to connect Lisa with the memory of Soldier at Rowan Isle House. In addition, both Lisa and Sarge were seeking refuge to protect their children.

Overall, I felt that this was an okay read that was quite restrained in terms of its eventual revelations.

The House On The Lake. The synopsis, the atmosphere, the struggle. It held such incredible promise. A woman, Lisa is on the run from her husband, Mark. A woman and her three-year-old son, Joe. An impossible situation that finally breaks the woman – it gives her the edge and the courage to leave. She essentially kidnaps her son and goes on the run, a plan loosely concocted. She must make it to her friends Yorkshire cottage. A cottage on the lake. Rowan Isle House. A story told in dual timeframes. The plan didn’t account for how dilapidated the house would be. It’s no place for a frightened woman…no place for a three-year-old boy. Hostile and cold just like the life Lisa has been living.

We also have the point of view of an eleven-year-old girl, Grace approximately fifteen years previously. The similarities between the two storylines are startling. They are both living unconventional lives in the house. The walls of Rowan Isle House has seen some sights. Grace is living with her father, who is ex SAS and from all appearances seems to be experiencing the symptoms of PTSD. The girl has an extremely harsh life and it is so far away from a regular childhood it is awful. He treats her more like a solider, referring to her as solider number one – but only when she passes the tasks that deem her to be worthy of the title.

Unfortunately, House On The Lake didn’t work for me. The plot just seemed to be so inconceivably unbelievable. The urge to escape a terrifying domestic abuse situation is strong, especially when a child is involved but to escape to an inhospitable house with no electric, water or heating just seemed idiotic. Where was the simple and rational thought process of staying with friends or even accessing the help available through the avenues of the police and women’s aid? I fully accept the fear factor and it always isn’t easy but surely it would have easier than the route she chose?

One other thing I found at odds with the situation and Lisa’s behaviour was just how much she put herself out there. She didn’t want to be memorable to those in the village, but she didn’t exactly do the whole incognito deal well. She would be terrible in a spy situation. At the very least she could have had a name change. That was one aspect of the plot that just didn’t add up.

The House On The Lake was just extremely slow and for most of the book nothing of any note seemed to happen in relation to Lisa and Joe’s story. I couldn’t bring myself to be invested or to really care about the conclusion of her story. Grace was a more pragmatic narrative, but I was only slightly more invested in her as a character. Although this was the first book I’ve read by the author I will attempt one of her other books.

Lisa is desperate to escape from Mark, the controlling husband, with her son Joe and she escapes to Rowan House that a friend told her would always be there for her, but she has a real shock when she arrives as the house is derelict and has no electricity or water and Joe is constantly asking for his father. Grace lives with her father an ex soldier who treats her like a recruit calling her Soldier 1 but how will these stories 15 years apart collide?

A good psychological thriller that burns slowly to start with but gets you hooked on the characters, especially Grace who is desperate for a normal life and it is obvious that her father is suffering from PTSD but there is no-one there to diagnose it or help her