📖 Blog Tour ~A Little Place in Prague by Julie Caplin

 

One More Chapter
23 October 2024
Romantic Escapes #12

My thanks to the publisher and Rachel's Random Resources for my copy of the book
and the invitation to the tour

It's been years since Anna has seen Leo Knight. And of all the apartments in all the cities in all the world, he just happens to walk in to her cosy new attic home – as her new housemate.

As the two walk the cobbled streets of Prague, taking in the sights and sounds from Wenceslas Square, frosted with snow, to the soft glow of candlelit Charles Bridge, the enchantment of the City of a Hundred Spires soon starts to work its magic on them…

📖 My Review..

This charming winter romance takes us right into the heart of the beautiful city of Prague where we meet Anna Love and Leo Knight who are unexpected housemates when they both arrive in the city to learn more about the art of beer production. There’s a lovely twist to their relationship which I won’t spoil but which adds a delicious frisson of will they, won’t they romance.

A Little Place in Prague is a lovely, descriptive story which brings the beautiful city of Prague alive, as both the place and the people are described in such a way that it feels as if you are following in Anna and Leo’s footsteps as they each adapt to life in the city, enjoying its many attractions and making friends with local people. I especially enjoyed the description of both the food and drink which the author describes in such realistic detail that it becomes an absolute joy to imagine the culinary feasts she sets before your eyes.

Whilst this is now the thirteenth book in the Romantic Escapes series, it is very much a standalone read which is filled with the author’s trademark passion for travel and food and also at its heart is a beautiful second chance love story which warms the soul.

About the Author

Julie Caplin, formerly a PR director, swanned around Europe for many years taking top food and drink writers on press trips (junkets) sampling the gastronomic delights of various cities in Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, Copenhagen and Switzerland. It was a tough job but someone had to do it. These trips have provided the inspiration and settings for the highly successful Romantic Escapes series which have hit the best seller charts in Italy, Germany and the Czech Republic and have sold over two million copies worldwide.

The first book in the nine strong series,The Little Café in Copenhagen, was shortlisted for a Romantic Novel of the Year Award.

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📖 Featured Book of the Month ~ The Place of Tides by James Rebanks

 

Penguin
17 October 2024

My thanks to the publisher for my copy of this book

We are all in need of lights to follow.

One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on.

Back at home, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly – and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island.

This is the story of that season. It is the story of a unique and ancient landscape, and of the woman who brought it back to life. It traces the pattern of her work from the rough, isolated toil of bitter winter, building little wooden huts that will protect the ducks come spring; to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for the woman to gather, like feathered gold.

Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not at all what he had previously thought. As the weeks pass, what began as a journey of escape becomes an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge and forgiveness.

📖 My Review..

Seven years after first meeting Anna, James Rebanks leaves behind his Cumbrian farm and returns to the remote Norwegian island where Anna, now elderly, protects the Eider Ducks who return to the island each year and from which the precious eiderdown is collected. Spending springtime on the island known as The Place of Tides will test the resilience of James, Anna and her companion, Ingrid but together they learn to form a community and coexist amicably together.

With such a fascinating wealth of stories, Anna recounts the history of the rocky islands of this isolated Norwegian archipelago which lie on the edge of the Arctic circle. Recounting tales about the harshness of survival, and complete with the same degree of stubbornness which allowed her ancestors to survive, Anna, keeps the old ways alive, maintaining harsh traditions which are as fragile as the ecology to which the islands still cling.  From the surge of the tides, to the swooping majesty of seabirds in flight, the beauty and harshness of the natural world unfolds, a world which is increasingly under threat. The arrival of the ducks to the island, to nest and rear their young, is when the work begins in earnest and keeping them safe from predators and allowing natural order to be maintained takes time, skill and effort.

Poetic, lyrical and beautifully quiet in places, this is not a book to be rushed, or squandered, but rather find the time to sit and allow the ebb and flow of the tides to set its own momentum just as Anna’s forgotten way of life allows her life story and that of the Eider ducks to be heard at their own distinct pace. I have no hesitation in making The Place of Tides my Featured Book of the Month for November. 

About the Author

James Rebanks runs a family-owned farm in the Lake District in northern England. A graduate of Oxford University, James works as an expert advisor to UNESCO on sustainable tourism.

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