A beautiful story! Carnations in Lisbon takes the reader on a fascinating journey that is heart warming, heart breaking and full of passion, suspense and raw emotion. I couldn't put this book down. This is a clever and insightful novel that captures the emotions of the characters and subtly weaves their stories into the confronting backdrop of Portugal's turbulent times. This is a triumph and highly recommended!

I really, really wanted to enjoy this novel. And, for the first two-thirds, I genuinely did.

Anyone familiar with my tastes and reviews knows that I love novels that explore multiple perspectives and narratives. In addition, I'm familiar with Lisbon and the history of the dictatorship. All in all, 'Carnations in Lisbon' should have been a perfect fit for me and in some ways it was: I loved how the two stories in the 1970s and the modern world unfolded alongside each other; I enjoyed the motley crew of characters, even the "villains"; the conceit was convincing and interesting.

But, as the book went on, there were jarring moments where things were mentioned casually as if we already knew them when, in fact, this was an important detail to move the plot along. In the last part, a third narrative was picked up that didn't add much to the overall story and there were some ideas included that, in my option, would really have been better left to be more fully explored in a different novel; perhaps that's the idea and I was sufficiently convinced by Wilson's writing that I would gladly give a follow-up focussing on some of the lesser characters a go.

By the end, I found that there were too many ideas in the book for it to be as coherent as I would have liked.