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Christmas at Hollybush Farm by Jo Thomas #Review

    Welcome to another festive read by Jo Thomas. Christmas at Hollybush Farm was published by Penguin on October 9th.   Jemima Jones is driving home to her family's magical hill-top farm for Christmas…  And on arrival, she soon learns that her dad has been keeping a secret – all is not as it seems, and Hollybush Farm is struggling to make ends meet! Worried about losing the childhood home she loves, Jemima must pull on her winter wellies and get stuck in. Amid the chaos of chasing after escaping sheep and organising the Christmas tractor run, Jemima begins documenting her slice of farming life on social media. As she builds a supportive online following, she also forms an offline connection in the shape of charming, retired rugby player Llew, her very own Santa's helper.  With a sprinkle of festive cheer and a dash of goodwill, might the community pull together to help save the farm in time for Christmas? My Thoughts Jemima returns home to find that her w...

A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson #Review


What a great tour there has been to celebrate Polly Samson's  A Theatre for Dreamers. This may be its final day, but there are plenty of great bloggers to look back at who have praised this novel- just check out the poster at the foot of this post.
 
A Theatre for Dreamers is a novel about a place and a circle that have transfixed the world for decades



1960. The world is dancing on the edge of revolution, and nowhere more so than on the Greek island of Hydra, where a circle of poets, painters and musicians live tangled lives, ruled by the writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston, troubled king and queen of bohemia. Forming within this circle is a triangle: its points the magnetic, destructive writer Axel Jensen, his dazzling wife Marianne Ihlen, and a young Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen. 



Into their midst arrives teenage Erica, with little more than a bundle of blank notebooks and her grief for her mother. Settling on the periphery of this circle, she watches, entranced and disquieted, as a paradise unravels. 



Burning with the heat and light of Greece, A Theatre for Dreamers is a spellbinding novel about utopian dreams and innocence lost – and the wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius. 



‘Superb’                                                            Thomas Kenneally   ‘

If summer was suddenly like a novel, it would be like this one. Immaculate’                                                        Andrew O’Hagan 



‘A sheer delight –  I’ve never been to Hydra but this book transports you and miraculously, you are there in 1960’ 
                                                                                     Jenny Éclair




My Thoughts
If ever a book was tailor made to be read on a sunny day, this is it. All the sights, the sounds, the colours, the scents of Hydra, in Greece are evoked in its pages. The light shimmers over the characters who are living out a Summer there in 1960. Before the Swinging 60's got underway, these bohemian  writers and composers are caught together, observed by the teenage Erica. 

     Of course, all is not well in this paradise and as Erica comes to realise, there is hurt and longing mixed together beneath the surface. Some of the behaviour is cruel and bitter but often it seems hidden away, hinted at. With some real life characters at the centre, you feel that you are looking in at a particular moment in their life accessible through the art which was produced. Unconventional though they may be, the feelings at the heart of it all are universal. 

In short: Greece shimmers. 
 
About the Author

 
Polly Samson is the author of two short story collections and two previous novels. Her work has been shortlisted for prizes, translated into several languages and has been dramatized on BBC Radio 4. She has written lyrics to four number one albums and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.  




You can follow Polly here: Website  |  Twitter  |  Facebook  

Book link: Amazon UK 

Thanks to Polly Samson, Bloomsbury Samson and Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for a copy of the book and a place on the tour.

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