A Place for Us - Harriet Evans

A Place For Us Part 1 by Harriet Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The FIRST of four exclusive part-serialisations of a A Place for Us by Harriet Evans - you'll be desperate to read on ...

The day Martha Winter decided to tear apart her family began like any other day.

So opens A Place for Us by Sunday Times bestselling author Harriet Evans, a book you'll dive into, featuring a family you'll fall in love with ... and never want to leave. If you devour Rosamund Pilcher and Maeve Binchy and have discovered Jojo Moyes, you'll be thrilled to add Harriet Evans to your collection of favourite authors.

The house has soft, purple wisteria twining around the door. You step inside.

The hall is cool after the hot summer's day. The welcome is kind, and always warm.

Yet something makes you suspect life here can't be as perfect as it seems.
After all, the brightest smile can hide the darkest secret.

But wouldn't you pay any price to have a glorious place like this?

Welcome to Winterfold.
Martha Winter's family is finally coming home.



It's difficult to rate a novel when you are only given the first part but based on my impressions that this first book really was not a story but more of a coming together of a family for the 80th birthday of the matriarch Martha and an exercise in setting the scene and building atmosphere. This first part concentrates on the individual characters and members of Martha's family to build tension and drama leading up to a secret that it appears they are all somehow involved in.

Each chapter deals with a member of the family having received an invitation to the party where an 'announcement' will be made and the reader along with the family are left trying to guess what this announcement could be. We are given little snippets of information about Daisy who appears to have been a rather difficult child and so perhaps the announcement has something to do with her. However as each family member is introduced we discover they all have their own secrets and any one of these could be to do with the announcement that Martha so tantalisingly will reveal at the party celebrations.

The first part of this book is a slow burner, nothing really happens in terms of the story but it nicely builds the tension and atmosphere for what hopefully happens in the second and remaining parts of the novel.

I feel sufficiently intrigued to want to discover more about this family and their secrets and would like to read the other 3 parts before making a final judgement. However based on this first part I would say this is building nicely and if the rest of the book maintains the tension and drama I feel that this could be a very good read especially if there are a couple of curve balls and an unpredictable ending.

I look forward to reading more - for now I would give this a 4 star rating.

I would like to thank the publisher for ending this in exchange for an honest review.