“Joe Tournier has a bad case of
amnesia. His first memory is of stepping off a train in the nineteenth-century
French colony of England. The only clue Joe has about his identity is a
century-old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse that arrives in London the same
month he does. Written in illegal English—instead of French—the postcard is
signed only with the letter “M,” but Joe is certain whoever wrote it knows him
far better than he currently knows himself, and he's determined to find the
writer. The search for M, though, will drive Joe from French-ruled London to
rebel-owned Scotland and finally onto the battle ships of a lost empire's Royal
Navy. In the process, Joe will remake history, and himself.”
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the history
you thought you knew was wrong? What if you were given the chance to go back in
time and change events that have already happened? If you did change things,
then the future as you know it wouldn’t be able to exist…you might not be
able to exist; those you love now might not exist because of the changes you’ve
made. It’s quite the deep soul-searching question, and one that comes to play
out in this novel.
The first thing that I have to say about this book is that
it is a slow burn, in fact all the novels I’ve read by Natasha Pulley are slow
burns, which is why I think I would do better reading her books than trying to
listen to them. That said, I don’t mean to suggest that the books are boring,
rambling on about nothing, I mean that the story slowly unfurls. Pulley is a
storyteller, she weaves a magical tale around “nothingness,” it is as though
you can read several pages and still feel left in the dark, but you continue to
read because you know, you know, that something interesting is being
kept from you, it’s just ever so slightly out of reach, but with a bit of
patience, the answer will come in its own time. At some point, everything you
have been told will suddenly start to make sense.
The year is 1898 when Joe Tournier disembarks from a train
in London into a world which is unfamiliar to both him and us the reader; only
this isn’t London, it’s Londres. The UK is under French rule and slavery still
seems to exist, somehow, the French won the Battle of Trafalgar, and the
English are now slaves.
