The Lost Letters of Evelyn Wright
by Clare Swatman
Starting over can be hard to do… So when mum of two Beth moves out of her beloved marital home and into an unloved and unkempt cottage, she can’t help but feel demoralised. Faced with months of DIY and dust, her children Jacob and Olivia aren’t impressed either. But when Beth finds a box of letters while she’s clearing out the children’s room, things start to look up.
The correspondence is decades old, between agony aunt Evelyn and those in need of solace. Intrigued as to why the letters have been kept safe all these years, Beth can’t resist reading them, and as the wisdom and kindness of Evelyn falls off the pages, so Beth starts to feel she has a friend and champion in this woman she has never met.
Good advice doesn’t age, and as life starts to look brighter, Beth begins to wonder if she could track down Evelyn and thank her for her help. But as Beth uncovers more about Evelyn’s story, it becomes clear that everything is not as it seems. And now Beth is determined to bring peace to Evelyn as she has to her.
A spell-binding, heart-warming story of friendship, love and being brave enough to be yourself.
My Rating:
Favorite Quotes:
Rob’s betrayal had taken more from me than just him, and I didn’t think I’d ever forgive him for that.
I recognised the pattern from my parents’ house, where the tea set was always locked away in a cabinet ‘for best’, as if they were waiting for the Queen to come for tea.
When it came down to it, things didn’t change as much over the decades as we might think. Love– with friends, family or lovers– had always been the glue that held everything together. It was merely the details that changed.
My Review:
My first Clare Swatman experience and I picked an excellent one to start on my path to enlightenment. Her writing style was emotive and thoughtful yet easy to follow with a unique premise and well-nuanced storylines and narratives that pulled me in and held me close.
Beth was forced to start over while navigating a painful divorce, realistic single-parenting problems, and unexpected life lessons. She gradually worked her way towards healing by anonymously helping others as an agony aunt on her newly developed website after finding inspiration from a stash of old letters written and answered some thirty years prior.
I felt every bump of Beth’s journey and reveled in her successes and was well pleased and satisfied by the story’s end. I will most definitely be perusing Ms. Swatman’s listings for similar gems.
Clare Swatman is the author of seven women’s fiction novels. Her latest, The World Outside My Window, is a story about the power of friendships and the importance of community. Before writing books, Clare spent 20 years writing for women’s magazines in the UK.
Clare lives in Hertfordshire in the UK with her husband and two boys. Even the cat is male, which means she’s destined to be outnumbered forever.