The sea stole him from her. Could it bring him back?
Winter, 1900. A little boy washes up on the beach of a small fishing village in Scotland, barely alive. He bears an uncanny resemblance to teacher Dorothy's son, lost to the sea many years before.
When the village is snowed in, Dorothy agrees to look after the child until he can be returned home. But, as the past rises to meet the present, long-buried secrets in this tight-knit community start to come to light. And Dorothy finds herself thrown together again with the reclusive fisherman Joseph, after years of keeping their distance.
Debut novel based in the United Kingdom
Publisher UK: Vintage, Harvill Secker
Publisher US: Simon & Schuster
Publishing Date UK: 6 March 2025
Publishing Date US: March 18 2025
The Stolen Child by WB Yeats
Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim grey sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving olden dances Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight; To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And anxious in its sleep. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes From the hills above Glen-Car, In pools among the rushes That scarce could bathe a star, We seek for slumbering trout And whispering in their ears Give them unquiet dreams; Leaning softly out From ferns that drop their tears Over the young streams. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going, The solemn-eyed: He'll hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal-chest. For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.
Julia Kelly interweaves aspects of Yeats poem heartbreakingly beautifully to describe Dorothy’s son Moses drowning in the sea. This disturbing loss sends Dorothy into trauma she cannot heal from. Especially, years later when a small boy washes up onshore bearing a strong resemblance to her son.
Written in a dual era storyline, The Fisherman’s Gift tells the backstory of the hardships Dorothy experiences with her female neighbors in this remote Scottish fishing village.
I found The Fisherman’s Gift deeply moving and I couldn’t put it down. My heart broke for Dorothy but I could appreciate her steadfastness she had for the people in her life.
Living in exile in Venice, the disgraced Lord Byron revels in the freedoms of the city But when he is associated with the deaths of local women, found with wounds to their throats, and then a novel called The Vampyre is published under his name, rumours begin to spread that Byron may be the murderer…
As events escalate and tensions rise – and his own life is endangered, as well as those he holds most dear – Byron is forced to play detective, to discover who is really behind these heinous crimes. Meanwhile, the scandals of his own infamous past come back to haunt him…
Publishing Company: Orenda Books (U.K.)
Publication Date: Hardback 24 April 2025, eBook 25 April 2025.
Lord Byron the enigmatic cad enjoying his time in Venice, Italy. He can’t help it if women continuously throw themselves at him. What’s a romantic poet to do? Throw in a doppelgänger, a sidekick named John Polidori and a story called, The Vampyre; you have a recipe for a gothic mystery. Oh yes but the key question here is is Lord Byron a murderer running around the canals of Venice Italy killing women? You’ll have to read Dangerous by Essie Fox to find out! Dangerous is a fun and exciting read. A clever, not so serious depiction of an aspect of Lord Byron’s life where his reputation precedes him and continues to get him into trouble. Dangerous is a perfect gothic mystery in every way. You will laugh along with Lord Byron and you will start to doubt those around him as the mystery unfolds and secrets come out. However, Venice is the star of this show whispering her secrets in the wee hours of the night while the moonlight reflects off the water along the grand canal. Thank you to Karen Sullivan of Orenda Books and Netgalley for my review copy of Dangerous by Essie Fox.
Julia Margaret Cameron photograph by Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, 1870 V&A
“I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.” — Julia Margaret Cameron
The following text is from The Morgan Library & Museum website:
Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron explores the path-breaking career of photography's first widely recognized artist. Cameron (1815-1879) was born in Calcutta modern day Kolkata to a French mother and English father, in 1848; with her husband and children, she moved to England where her sisters introduced her to the elite cultural circles in which they traveled. Residing on the Isle of Wight, where she was close neighbors with the poet Alfred Tennyson, Cameron acquired her first camera at age 48. In only eleven years she would create thousands of exposures and leave an enduring image of the Victorian era as an age of intellectual and spiritual ambition.
Cameron's prodigious drive helped her become a probing portraitist of leading writers, artists, and scientists, such as Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, G.F. Watts, and Charles Darwin, while her absorption with fine art, notably Renaissance painting, led her to create staged tableaux in a model that has been perpetually rediscovered by photographers down to the present. Most distinct of all was Cameron's wholly personal handling of her medium. Heedless of contemporary conventions of technique, alert to the happy effects of accident and indifferent to critical scorn, she embraced a style of spontaneous intimacy, that distanced her from the photographic establishment of her time and class. Motion blur, highly selective faces, and even fingerprints on the glass negatives (which required developing before their emulsions dried) are among the idiosyncrasies of her singular oeuvre.
Cameron was quick to exploit publishing and promotional opportunities: at London's South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria & Albert Museum) she secured not only an exhibition in 1865 but, a few years later, studio space, and she was the first photographic artist to be collected by the institution. Arresting Beauty features prints from its initial purchase, and from subsequent additions to its holdings, which have grown to number nearly one thousand. The exhibition includes Cameron's large camera lens (all that survives of her apparatus), pages from her unfinished memoir in manuscript, Annals of My Glass House, and portraits she made in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) after Cameron and her husband moved there in 1875.
Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron was created by the V&A - Touring the World
2025 has started out with some beautifully written novels that tell stories capturing themes of hope, love, loss, grief and trauma. I love discovering new authors such as, Julia Kelly and Ronnie Turner. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have.
The sea stole him from her. Could it bring him back?
Winter, 1900. A little boy washes up on the beach of a small fishing village in Scotland, barely alive. He bears an uncanny resemblance to teacher Dorothy's son, lost to the sea many years before.
When the village is snowed in, Dorothy agrees to look after the child until he can be returned home. But, as the past rises to meet the present, long-buried secrets in this tight-knit community start to come to light. And Dorothy finds herself thrown together again with the reclusive fisherman Joseph, after years of keeping their distance.
Debut novel based in the United Kingdom
Publisher: Vintage, Harvill Secker
Publishing Date: 6 March 2025
When fiction is fatal…
Living in exile in Venice, the disgraced Lord Byron revels in the freedoms of the city But when he is associated with the deaths of local women, found with wounds to their throats, and then a novel called The Vampyre is published under his name, rumours begin to spread that Byron may be the murderer…
As events escalate and tensions rise – and his own life is endangered, as well as those he holds most dear – Byron is forced to play detective, to discover who is really behind these heinous crimes. Meanwhile, the scandals of his own infamous past come back to haunt him…
Publishing Company: Orenda Books (U.K.)
Publication Date: Hardback 24 April 2025, eBook 25 April 2025
TO BE READ
Suspected of murdering their parents, sisters Lily and Della flee to a strange, unnamed island in Scotland, and their arrival puts in motion a horrifying series of events… Literary suspense meets folk horror in 2025’s most original, mesmerising modern gothic masterpiece…
Publication Date: 27 February 2025
Format: paperback
Pages: 300
Publisher: Orenda Books
Subject: Thriller/Suspense
CURRENTLY READING
A moving, redemptive novel about the unexpected friendship between Marilyn Monroe and a young maid whose life will be changed forever...
Pauline, a young chambermaid who works at the legendary Mapes Hotel in Reno, Nevada, is asked to step in for a colleague and clean Suite 614. Although she was told the rooms were empty, a dazed, sleepy woman appears before her. This is Mrs. Miller, aka Marilyn Monroe, whose stay in Reno coincides with the breakdown of her marriage to Arthur Miller and the filming of what was to be her last film, The Misfits.
Set in the American West in 1960 where the mustang horses run wild, an unexpected friendship unfolds between the most famous movie star in the world and a young cleaning woman whose life will be changed forever through the course of a few weeks. A testament to the enduring power of female friendship and a reimagining of a side of Marilyn Monroe that has never been seen before.
U.S.Publishing Company: Grand Central Publishing a division of Hachette Books
