Why a Booktrail?
Destination: Yorkshire Moors Departure Time: 1700s, 2011
Can the whispers in a House of Shadows across time explain the past and clear up the future?
House of Shadows
What you need to know before your trail
Kate Vavasour wakes in hospital, but she can remember nothing about the family gathered around her bed, or of her life before the accident. Doctors tell her she has post-traumatic amnesia and that her memories will return. But when they do, they’re not hers and she is remembering a past life of a woman called Isabel. Isabel Vavasour, lived and died at Askerby Hall over four hundred years earlier . . .
Kate leaves the hospital and returns to the very hall she has such vivid memories of as Isabel. She is told she fell from the tower roof but she is keen to piece together the events of what led up to that. There are troubling thoughts which enter her head such as why her son Felix doesn’t seem to know her, and of whispers which seem to travel across time.Whispers which ask her for help….
Travel Guide
This story takes place on the beautiful North York Moors. Travel literary style to the wild and lonely moors with its crumbling old hall and a century of intrigue.
Askerby Hall is a large expanse of a place – the titled House of Shadows – where Kate returns to in order to recuperate following a fall. She has lost her memory and as parts start to come back, they are off someone who lived there before. someone who has lost her child and is asking for help in finding them.
Her memories are of landscape and the wild events of 400 years ago:
On the moors.” My eyes are close, but I can picture is to clearly it must be a memory. The sky over the moorland is a vast blue arch, broken only by a few blotches of clouds, as if dabbed there by an indifferent painter”
The House of Shadows
The setting of the hall is dark, dreary and foreboding as Kate’s mind slips back and forth in to the shadows of the past and reveal secrets hidden there for many years. Kate’s husband is dead, his parents unwelcoming and cold and the past a hidden secret of which no one speaks.
Askerby and its Hall are fictional, but the author has imagined them as somewhere near Lastingham, and the house itself an amalgam of Burton Agnes Hall, which is in quite a different part of Yorkshire, in fact and Cotehele in Cornwall – and the roof of Chillingham Castle
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
What a eerie and fantastically written novel. I just love Pamela;s novels and she is one of the few authors who can completely draw you into a time slip novel without you feeling that this is not real. I have walked in many of her characters’ shoes across time and this one was no different for the family and staff living at Askerby Hall as it appears in the novel were as real as if they were standing right in front of me.
The flow of writing is also sublime – floating from one time to another. Very cleverly done and all linked up so you believe everything that is said. Characters are fleshed out and explored and the dual time line allows you to see the house as it was, then as it is now, then back again – as if you are lifting history to examine it and then placing it back to see it pan out. Just gave me the shivers as it involved the fate of two women over centuries, memory loss and so much more and I was captivated from the very first page.
I was really intrigued by this novel as I’ve loved Pamela’s other ones and this is highly recommended. The Yorkshire Moors is the ideal setting for this story and really enhances the intrigue and sense of loss. Already looking forward to her next one!
Destination: Yorkshire Moors Departure Time: 1700s, 2011 Hope you enjoy your book trail of The House of Shadows. Timeslip novel with secrets of centuries past and present.
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