A rich and engrossing story of love, passion, secrets, and lies set in the gaiety, glamour, and grand country houses of post-war Edwardian England.
Summer 1924: on the eve of a glittering Society party, by the lake of a grand English country house, a young poet takes his life. The only witnesses, sisters Hannah and Emmeline Hartford, will never speak to each other again.
Winter 1999: Grace Bradley, 98, one-time house-maid of Riverton Manor, is visited by a young director making a film about the poet's suicide. Ghosts awaken and memories, long consigned to the dark reaches of Grace's mind, begin to sneak back through the cracks. A shocking secret threatens to emerge; something history has forgotten but Grace never could.
Set as the war-shattered Edwardian summer surrenders to the decadent twenties, The Shifting Fog is a thrilling mystery and a compelling love story.
The Shifting Fog Shifted Me Greatly
What an amazing sweeping piece of literature.
Set in the time immediately before the Great War and careening all the way through to the present day, Kate Morton has written an incredible chronicle of the life of a fictitious manor house family, told from the perspective of ladies maid Grace.
There are amazing twists and secrets and shames and scandals surrounding the Hartford family, despite the best efforts of its matriarchs to keep things under wraps.
It's an epic romance of Romeo and Juliet proportions, with the concurrent storylines of Hannah Hartford and Grace Reeves being explored in depth.
Everything I wanted out of the story, I got. The romance I wanted to happen, happened, albeit delayed by decades, the secrets came to the surface and it wasn't a bit predictable.
This is my first Kate Morton but it most definitely is not my last.
Samantha, 09/02/2015
