#Blogtour The Secret Keepers by Tilly Bagshawe

It's a pleasure to take part in the Blogtour The Secret Keepers by Tilly Bagshawe.

About the Author

Tilly Bagshawe is the internationally bestselling author of nineteen previous novels and has written for newspapers and magazines including the Sunday Times, Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. She lives in London with her husband and 4 children. She is available for interview and to write features. 

About the book

Sweeping from the French Riviera to the wind-blown Cornish cliffs, this is a spellbinding novel about the fates and fortunes of the Challant family – and the devastating secrets that echo through the years . . 

The beautiful bastide at Beaulieu-sur-Mer has always been an idyllic retreat for the Challant family, a place of glorious memories and sun-drenched summers. But the summer of 1928 changes everything. 

One humid, stormy night, a young local boy suffers a fatal accident in the bastide’s grounds – and the suspicious circumstances around his death sets off a chain of whispers in the town on the Riviera. 

For the Challant children, they have no choice but to move on and leave those terrible events in the past. But through the years of loves and losses, marriages and betrayals, the Challants’ lives will always be tainted by that night. And it’s only by unlocking devastating family secrets that they’ll finally be set free…

Review

The Challant children are wedged between a mother who secretly despises herself and her husband for not being able to live the life she wants. Her soul wants to be the artist, and yet she is as caged as the birds she treasures in her remarkable aviary. Her husband rules the roost with a patriarchal sense of superiority. 

As the reader moves from the adult children in the future back to important periods in their past, it becomes clear that a tragic event has not only triggered a lifetime of fears and insecurities, but perhaps also determined the paths the children have taken. The adults they grow into, the baggage they carry and the secrets they keep - it has the potential to destroy them.

I think Bagshawe deviates from her usual popular recipe with this book - it has more of a family and tortured emotional bond meets the demands of unresolved trauma vibe. Evolving from the physical to the fraught webs of the kind of relationships that weave webs of invisible patterns across both decades and people.

It's contemporary fiction with a steadfast hold in the past. A story driven by past fears, trauma, conflicted feelings of guilt, and at the core of it all is a tragic mystery.

Buy The Secret Keepers at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: Harper Collins; pub date 11th April 2024 | PBO | Audio | Ebook | £8.99. Buy at Amazon com.