The Visitors

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Catherine Burns has created a really twisted story in "The Visitors" that I thoroughly enjoyed and it will stay with me a long time (choosing rather inept moments to pop into my thoughts) - it's dark, quite disturbing and really rather evil and I'd happily recommend to readers who fancy a change to the fast paced and aggressive thrillers that are flooding the market at the minute. Loved it Esme’s column in the newspaper grounded me in the here and now whilst also giving valuable insights into the myths, legends, flora and fauna of the landscape.

Esme Nicholls is to spend the summer in Cornwall. Her late husband Alec, who died fighting in the war, grew up in Penzance, and she’s hoping to learn more about the man she loved and lost. I’ve read The Photographer of the Lost and so knew Caroline Scott’s passion for bringing to light untold perspectives and stories from the Great War. What I wasn’t expecting was how easy it was to empathise with Esme and become tangled up in all the emotions. Over the summer of 1923 in Cornwall we are with esme Nichols a young widow. While there she will stay with Gilbert in a rambling seaside house where he lives with his former brothers in arms. She gets to know the men and their different stories which I loved. However everything isn’t always what it seems and when someone arrives later in the summer it turns sends world upside down.Esme’s memories of her marriage to Alec, her reflection that more time has passed since his death than they spent together, is a poignant reminder of the grief that so many women experienced during and after the First World War; the dreams dashed and the lives changed forever. At one point Esme recalls how she and Alec had vowed to ‘be braver together, travel further, and never be like those couples who sat in disappointed silence’. Now, often all Esme has is that disappointed silence.

It’s 1923 and Esme has been widowed for seven years. Her husband of only a few months went to war in France but after two years of regular letters, they suddenly stopped. Then one fateful day the letter she dreads arrives and she is informed that he has died. Caroline Scott has done it again!! Created a storyline and characters that captivate and affect you emotionally as you connect with their plight and watch the drama unfold as they try to make sense of the world, and do their best to move on. Touching briefly on how displaced and disparaged the women were after the war, (it’s not just the men who had to adjust to change), Esme is hoping to come to some decisions during her summer stay in Cornwall.Revealing the ghost in the opening paragraph promises a fresh twist and the story sparks with mounting tension. It is the summer of 1923 and Esme Nicholls, a war widow, is visiting Cornwall, the home county of her late husband. Like many women she is grieving and living with the consequences of World War One, as are the group of men and women she stays with. Their story is told through the narratives of the characters, interspersed with Esme's newspaper articles on the flora and fauna, and excerpts from the memoirs of one of the male war veterans.