Part of the Spell

(Paperback)

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Description

Would you rather be safe or free In a small English town, everyone is silently struggling to be the person they think they should be. Tacita is pretending to ignore her husband's affair; Theresa is determined to stay so busy she won't have time to feel guilty; and Stella just wants everything to stay the same. But when Sheila, a widow, mother and grandmother, disappears from the town, their private lives start to collide and change ...

Reviews

Born and brought up in the Essex market town where she still lives, Stella is content with the everyday satisfactions that marriage and motherhood bring. Only when her own mother goes missing does Stellas sense of herself, and the world she inhabits, shift . . . like her central characters life, Rachel Heaths novel has its own quiet pleasures. * Sunday Times *
Heaths skill is to wind people together, some of them related to one another, others strangers with nothing in common except the place in which they live . . . This is a novel about personality, and behaviour oh, and Saffron Walden. Much is convincing (Saffron Walden entirely so: I feel I know it). The Finest Type of English Womanhood was shortlisted for the Costa first novel award. The second is notoriously hard to pull off, particularly when the first has attracted attention. Part of the Spell goes a good way towards meeting that challenge. -- Penelope Lively * Guardian *
This quiet, engaging novel ... casts its own enchantment on the reader, teasing you in through meanderings and byways to the crux of the matter honest self-knowledge, engagement with the reality of our ordinary lives, facing up to ourselves with all our history, our limitations and faults, forgiveness of ourselves for not being bigger, better people ... Part of the Spell is a perceptive and warmhearted celebration of home, and of knowing and accepting who you are. * Book Oxygen *

Author Bio

Rachel Heath was born in Bristol in 1968. She worked as an editor in publishing, and then as a literary consultant for television and as a reader before writing her first book. Her first novel,The Finest Type of English Womanhood, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2009 and for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2010. She is also a contributor to the short story anthology, The Best Little Book Club in Town. She has three children, and lives in Bath.