📖 Blog Tour ~ The Wilderness by Sarah Duguid

 

Headline
21 July 2022

My thanks to the publisher for my copy of the book
and to Random Things Tours for the invitation to the blog tour

When Anna and David receive a phone call late one evening, their lives are upturned. Within minutes, they are travelling to the west coast of Scotland, preparing to care for two young sisters, tragically and suddenly orphaned.

It's a beautiful place, the heather is in bloom, the birds wheel above the waves, the deer graze peacefully in the distance. But the large granite house is no longer a home for the girls, and Anna knows she can never take the place of their mother. Then David invites his friend to stay, to 'ease them through' and Anna finds herself increasingly isolated, with everything she - and the girls - once knew of life discarded and overruled by a man of whom she is deeply suspicious.

📖 My Review..

Any phone call that comes late at night invariably heralds bad news, and for Anna and David, at home in London,  the call informing them of a devastating accident will change their ordered lives forever. 

Hurrying up to a remote island in Western Scotland to be with the now orphaned children of David's brother and his wife, and with two grieving teenage girls to look after,  life for all of them is never going to be easy especially as Anna and David, now in their sixties with a grown up family of their own, have had to put their own lives on hold. Into this complicated mix comes Brendan, a rather odd friend of Anna and David's, who wants to help out with the situation but who merely makes things much more difficult for everyone.

The Wilderness is a starkly forbidding tale, and whilst beautifully descriptive of a bleak and sullen land it is brightened by the imaginative description of the coast where this odd mix of people are all living together. The sisters, Isabella and Sasha are themselves a study in grief, volatile, mercurial, lost and alone. They are in desperate need of love and understanding but what comes across is the story of fractured and disturbing relationships.

Accomplished, thought provoking and with a dark and sinister edginess, The Wilderness is a story which will stay with me for a long time.

🍬Best Read with ...a bag of lemon sherbets

About the Author

Sarah Duguid grew up on  a farm in Lincolnshire and now lives in London. Her stunning debut Look at Me came out in 2016. The Wilderness is her second novel.

Twitter @SarahDuguid4 #TheWilderness

@TinderPress

@RandomTTours