The Wildflowers

I absolutely adore books about glamorous families and the secrets they hide, books about the houses binding those families together and I have a special fondness for books set by the sea. Add in the fact that The Wildflowers is by Harriet Evans whose books I have always loved and I knew I was in for a treat. I saved The Wildflowers for a cold day between Christmas and New Year when I was laid up with a box of tissues and a pharmacy-worth of vapour rub, olbas oil and lemon drinks and dived right in. It didn’t disappoint…
The wildflowers are the Wilde Family. A glorious, glittering family who spend their summers at The Bosky, their house by the beach in Dorset entertaining, drinking and playing. Tony is a renowned actor, Althea a celebrated beauty and their children, Cordelia and Ben, quirky, indulged and happy. They are a constant source of fascination for Madeleine Fletcher who also spends her summers by the beach in Dorset – but little Madeleine’s life isn’t glittering. At its best she’s at boarding school and spending her weekends with her aunt, at its worst it’s just her and her father alone all summer. If she’s lucky she’s forgotten and neglected… Madeleine spies on the Wildes, knows all their secrets, their hopes and dreams, a habit she can’t break even when she finally is noticed, accepted and finally loved by them.
The book has several timeframes. We follow the end of Tony’s childhood throughout the Second World War, the story entwining with his adulthood and the coming of age of his children through the seventies and eighties, finishing in the present day, Tony long dead, his children estranged and the Bosky falling apart. Secrets are exhumed and all the intricately woven plot strands come together to make a whole as we find out why Tony is so flawed, how those flaws break his family apart and almost destroy them all. There are shades of Noel Streatfeild and Dodie Smith winding through this captivating, heartbreaking book. Highly, highly recommended. Harriet Evan’s best book to date.

A fantastic book full of family troubles and secrets brilliant characters you really feel like you know them

I've been reading Harriet Evans's novels since her 2005 debut, Going Home, and I'm a particular fan of the turn she's taken in her last two books, A Place for Us and The Butterfly Summer, moving away from 'chick lit' towards modern family sagas. I always enjoy a good chick lit, but there's something in Evans's writing, and in her interest in home, place and family dynamics, that seems to work especially well telling these kinds of stories, and I've found them all really absorbing. The Wildflowers is no exception, and I think it might be her best yet. It focuses at first on a single family in the 1970s and 1980s: Althea and Tony Wilde and their two children, Cordelia and Ben, known as 'The Wildflowers' by the locals who live near the 'Bosky', the old family house in Worth Bay. The book looks forward into the future, letting us know early on that this family has become fractured, even as all its members pursue their own creative careers; Althea and Tony as actors, Cordelia as a singer and Ben as a film director. But the book also reaches back into Tony's past; orphaned during the Second World War, he's taken in by his eccentric archaeologist great-aunt, Dinah. Finally, we see the family through the eyes of Mads, a neglected and abused child who grows up near Cordelia and Ben, and longs to be a part of their games.

All of the cast of The Wildflowers are completely convincing, but I was especially won over by Cordelia and Dinah. Cordelia is vividly flawed, defending her own sense of right and wrong to the death, and yet, in terms of her own personal conduct, ends up doing the least damage. Dinah is still mysterious even by the end of the novel, making us share Tony's desire to know more about her, and what her life was like before and after she ended up taking care of him. Althea is also nicely done; she could easily have become a stereotypical martyr, but Evans gives her a life of her own, as she does with Mads, who manages to escape some of the most familiar 'outsider' tropes. If there is a flaw in this novel, it's that there was a bit too much Tony for my taste. I felt at times that we were being nudged to sympathise with him, and although I didn't feel completely unsympathetic towards him, I wasn't sure about the way the narrative seemed to be weighted on his side. I found the sections from his point of view in the 1940s difficult to get through, and thought they could have been cut down - especially as I was so gripped by the sections set in later time periods.

The Wildflowers perfectly evokes the golden past of one particular family and what happened to pull it apart - and questions whether this idyll ever really existed. Top-notch storytelling.

I received a free copy of this novel for review from the publisher via NetGalley.

Enjoyed this book, you can always count on Harriet for a gripping family saga with twists and turns!

This was an interesting book relating to a gifted family and their impact and interactions with those around them. I enjoyed the flashbacks but did get a bit lost at one point. Definitely recommended.

I really enjoyed this book very vivid written beautifully.
This is definitely one book to read for 2018/
Loved it