Keith Stuart’s best yet, something so different and unique. Not going to reveal too much but could see it being a bbc one Sunday night drama.. Highly recommend.

I’ve read two books by Keith Stuart and have always been impressed by the way he can handle emotive subjects and people who are on the edge. This is no exception. Laura suffers from crippling anxiety and is given a job by her mum’s friend. She’s asked to act as carer to Will, nearing his nineties, to see if he’s safe in his home or needs residential care. He’s curmudgeonly, but Laura persists with him.
I found myself really caring about them both. He seemed to live in the past, yearning for his wife, Elsa, though she was never recorded anywhere as living at that address. We watched the story unfold and had to decide whether he really had lost his wife in the bombing, or had fantasised a relationship that never existed. We jump through time to the war and back to 2008, wanting Will to be right, and not a dementia victim. Laura has her own demons, and we begin to find out why. The story intertwines these separate lives in a brilliant way. I adored the final outcome. I wish all the books I read were this good!

Laura is a young woman who is struggling to manage her job as a carer due to personal reasons. Her work are understanding and instead of a normal caseload, they allocate her one client- Will Emerson. She has to get to know Will and determine if he is still fit for independent living or if he needs to be moved to a nursing home. Will is known as an eccentric man, he talks about his wife Elsa who he lost during the war. The problem is, there's no record of Elsa living with him or even existing. It's Laura's job to find out if these are true memories or a fantasy caused by dementia. I thought this book was well written with well fleshed out characters that you end up caring about a great deal. Some of the book crosses slightly over to science fiction and fantasy which was unexpected but done very well. I'm a big fan of Keith Stuart's other work and this one definitely doesn't disappoint!

Wow this book was amazing! As soon as I finished it I wanted to read it all over again, something I never do!

I loved Days of Wonder when I read it a couple of years ago, and was so excited when I received an email from the publisher to read the author’s latest book. Well it grabbed me from the first page! I had to know more about Will and his wife Elsa and if Laura was able to help him.

I love dual timeline stories and this is one of the best I’ve read. It’s told through Will’s journals from the late 1930s, and from Laura’s point of view in 2007.

I loved Will, Elsa and Laura, they were fabulous characters who I believed in and wanted the best for. I sympathised with Laura as she struggled to make sense of Will’s situation. Was he telling her the truth or was the dementia making him make everything up about Elsa?

This was one of those books that captivated me and made feel like I was inside the book with the characters. I could see everything that was happening to them and could almost feel the electricity and here the buzz of the radio in the house when strange things were happening every time Laura visited Will. She didn’t know if it was her imagination, the withdrawal affects from her medication or something spooky going on! I didn’t know either and really hoped it was real. There were some fantastic reveals in this story with one near the end that really took me by surprise.

I loved the period details from the wartime story and went scurrying off to Google to check out Sham’s Castle. I can easily see this as a film, it’s ripe for a book to screen adaption, and I can imagine David Warner playing Will.

I highly recommend this one if you enjoy dual timeline novels partly set in World War Two.