The Stranger by Kate Riordan

 

 

 

Synopsis

Cornwall, 1940.

In the hushed hours of the night a woman is taken by the sea.

Was it a tragic accident? Or should the residents of Penhallow have been more careful about whom they invited in?

In the midst of war three women arrive seeking safety at Penhallow Hall.

Each is looking to escape her past.

But one of them is not there by choice.

As the threat of invasion mounts and the nightly blackouts feel longer and longer, tensions between the close-knit residents rise until dark secrets start to surface.

And no one can predict what their neighbour is capable of . . .

In a house full of strangers, who do you trust?

 

Review

The Stranger is set in the summer on 1940 against the sprawling backdrop of Penhallow, a beautiful country house in Cornwall. The house and its owner, the old Mrs Fox, has opened its doors to the Women’s Land Army whose aim is turn part of the gardens into a vegetable plot for the war effort.  Penhallow welcomes three young women; Diana has been sent away by her mother to join the WLA against her wishes,  Rose whose husband is fighting in the war and Jane the granddaughter of Mrs Fox.  The plot centres around these three women and Eleanor, Mrs Fox’s daughter, all who seem to be hiding something, all with a difficult past. The book opens on the night Diana goes missing and then back to the events that lead up to her disappearance and a body being swept into the sea.  The narrative is split between third person narrative and then the Diana’s first person narrative from her diary.

What stood out for me was the wonderful backdrop for this book.  Penhallow is a magnificent, if now crumbling country house, with its many rooms and large gardens enabling the plot to slowly reveal secrets of the past and enable new secrets to be formed.  The house is set with the cliffs and sea on one side and the woods and creek on the other; two complete opposite natural environments.  From the beginning the sea is a place where death happens and other terrible events, past and present, it is ever changing and its crashing against the rocks is a metaphor for the tension in the house.  The woods and creek and the little summer house are the antithesis to this, a place of happy memories for more than one character, a calming presence where past and present can exist more harmoniously.  The Cornwall setting, the large country house, the secrets hidden the forces of nature all bring to mind the works of Daphne Du Maurier.

Kate Riordan has written a diverse and mysterious cast of characters   Diana Devlin is the main character, and not a very likeable one.  She only seeks out friendship when she thinks she can gain something for it.  She is caustic in her comments of others, and won’t take no for an answer.  Her character is summed up perfectly by the cook who says Diana gets “..a taste for trouble and then can’t stop until you have drawn blood” (p210).  Rose, Jane and Eleanor all suffer at the hands of Diana.  Eleanore is agoraphobic and very troubled by an event that happened ion 1924.  She is only in her mid thirties, but her behaviour and the weight on her shoulders makes her come across as someone much older whose lived a tired and troubled life.  Her mother is a true matriarch, she is harsh, cold and takes pleasure in putting Eleanor down in front of people.  One thing that binds all the characters together is a trauma of some kind in there childhood that still envelopes them and has influenced the adults they have become.

 

The Stranger is a an atmospheric read, in setting and in the plot line.  It maybe set in the heat of summer but throughout there is a sense of darkness approaching, and underlying tension that we know results in a death.  There is a lot of smoke and mirrors in this book, and a plot that changes direction several times.  The ending was a bit abrupt for me, I would have liked the loose ends to be tied up to give a finality to the story.  But, apart from that I loved this book, it captured my attention for the beginning and  kept it throughout as I was never quite sure where the story was going.  It is an all encompassing read, that once you start you won’t be able to put down.