INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “An ambitious, compelling historical mystery with a fabulous cast of characters…Kate Morton at her very best.” –Kristin Hannah “An elaborate tapestry…Morton doesn’t disappoint.” –The Washington Post “Classic English country-house Goth at its finest.” –New York Post In the depths of a 19th-century winter, a little girl is abandoned on the streets of … Post
In the depths of a 19th-century winter, a little girl is abandoned on the streets of Victorian London. She grows up to become in turn a thief, an artist’s muse, and a lover. In the summer of 1862, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, she travels with a group of artists to a beautiful house on a bend of the Upper Thames. Tensions simmer and one hot afternoon a gunshot rings out. A woman is killed, another disappears, and the truth of what happened slips through the cracks of time. It is not until over a century later, when another young woman is drawn to Birchwood Manor, that its secrets are finally revealed.
Told by multiple voices across time, this is an intricately layered, richly atmospheric novel about art and passion, forgiveness and loss, that shows us that sometimes the way forward is through the past.
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The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton is charming read revolving around a house and it’s visitors for 150 years. It opens with Elodie Winslow, who is an archivist employed to organize and catalogue the writings and artifacts of James Stratton, a businessman and philanthropist from the middle to late nineteenth century, London. One day a box is found in an unused cloakroom, where it decidedly did not belong. Elodie fetches it and as she begins to explore it she comes upon a leather case, but it is what is inside with which she connects: a small photographic portrait and a sketchbook. The sketchbook contains a drawing of a how her mother had described when she was a child, as part of a favorite bedtime story. It captured Elodie as few things ever did, despite her love for her job.
The book begins to unfold with stories of people who lived in the house over the years, or visited it. Elodie became so entranced that she took the small, framed photo to share with her friend, Pippa, who was designing Elodie’s wedding dress.
Pippa snaps a photo with her phone and shares it with her mentor, who gives Pippa an photograph she had taken many years before: one of Elodie’s mother, who was a famous musician before she was killed, and another musician, a friend.
Morton did a masterful job weaving so many lives, over so may years, into a coherent story, touching Elodie and changing her life.
The stories are heart-rending: Edward Radcliffe, the painter who owned the house early in the story; Juliet, Elodie’s great-grandmother, and her son, Tip, Elodie’s great uncle, who had lives in the house when they had fled from London during WW II; Lily Millington, who had lain dead in the house for so long that her ghost came to inhabit it; Mrs. Hammet, the owner of the localinn who had inherited a priceless treasure and yet, had no idea of its worth .
What a wonderful book. The best sort of mystery, weaving stories together, lives together, until it all makes sense in the end. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
I received a free ARC of this book in exchange for a fair and impartial review. #theclockmakersdaughter #netgalley
A haunting tale, beautiful vivid language that invokes the finest poetry and most lyrical music. A novel for the senses and the spirit. Highly recommend.
The dates don’t truly explain how much I enjoyed this book. I loved the different time lines and how the story was told. I liked how it pulled so many different times, stories, and characters together to make the story complete.
I would suggest this book for the lover of historical fiction along with a good twist.
I was not disappointed with this latest novel from Kate Morton!! It’s a bit different the way it is structured and all, but it’s got all we can expect from her exceptional storytelling.
Whether you’re familiar with her work or not, The Clockmaker’s Daughter, is a fantastic place to start reading this amazing storyteller!! Her books are simply unforgettable. And they are definitely books to revisit again and again.
This was my first Kate Morton book and I was blown away! I particularly love the way Morton weaves together different characters’ stories and differing times of the past. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read!
I would not have finished The Clockmaker’s Daughter if it had not been a selection for my book club. Although Kate Morton writes beautiful prose, I found the book did not keep my interest. Part 3 and part 4 of the book did pull everything together. I like the premise of the story. But, the story branches off in too many different directions. Joanne Froggatt did a wonderful job as the narrator for the audio book edition and is the reason I gave it three stars.
A masterpiece!
Kate Morton’s Clockmaker’s Daughter deserves the description. This novel is a set of compelling stories woven together, each with their own mystery, drama and sadness. The plot is original and I was engaged by each and every character.
One my favorite Morton books.
Kate Morton came heavily recommended as someone looking to get into historical fiction, with a promise of an absolutely great literary style and lyrical voice. She definitely had both of those things, but that’s about where the positives of this book stop. Morton is wonderful when it comes to making words sounds beautiful and creating a sense of place, and considering one of the primary points of the novel is that a place can hold a sense of timeless beauty and belonging, I suppose her writing was in line with her theme. But there’s no amount of lush prose that can keep my interest in a novel when its plot and characters are lacking.
There are a great deal of details when it comes to characters, to the point where I was a little confused why I wasn’t connecting with any of them. We follow them through the most stressful experiences of their lives, often seeing them at their lowest points, their worries and sorrows spread out in a gorgeous prose for us to see, and yet I found that it was exceedingly hard to feel for them, or even to sum up any kind of of sympathy. The problem isn’t a lack of detail, but rather that we only see fragments of these characters without ever getting a chance to really know them. I expected this novel to center more on Elodie and her involvement with the story, a mystery driven by a unique connection, but instead we follow a series of characters and their history at the Birchwood Manor and spend little amount of time with them, jumping around from person to person. Is Elodie’s connection to Birchwood Manor really unique, among the faceless cast that rotate in and out of the house? How are we supposed to feel any kind of connection to her when the moment she begins to involve herself in the mystery the novel shoots away from her? I love the idea of an archivist as our protagonist, I loved the concept of a woman trapped by her dead mother’s legacy. I loved so many ideas about Elodie and this novel that seeing them all play out in such a lackluster fashion was immensely frustrating.
It’s incredibly hard to know or feel for any of the characters in the novel, as the second we become interested or attached the novel leaps away from them. There are characters that blur together because of similar problems; there are numerous people who all have the same guilt about their sibling being dead, regardless of the fact that they have little to do with their death, and reading about the same character archetype over and over doesn’t make for a theme, it’s just boring. There are moments of satisfaction: how the characters relate to one another over the years, faces we expected not to see again showing up, learning how various characters over the years ended up, but none of that would compare to actually seeing the characters develop and breathe on the page.
This leads to a problem with the plot. We barely get an idea of who Elodie is or why she is so interested in the items she uncovers before we leap to another perspective. So the mystery is never fully formed or realized; I actually had no idea what the mystery was supposed to be until more than three-quarters of the way through the book, and had lost any real interest in the novel far beforehand. The novel is supposed to center around the death of a woman and a robbery, yet because none of the characters were emotionally invested in these issues, I wasn’t either. I literally had no idea we were supposed to care about the missing heirloom until close to the end. Why should I? None of the characters cared about it, there was no search or inquiries made, no interesting theories proposed. It seemed like Morton gave us an idea of a mystery and expected us to care suddenly and deeply about it. The second mystery of the dead woman was only marginally more interesting; murder can only get you so far when the person murdered is an extraneous side character with no personality and little page time. The final mystery of the disappeared woman was hardly a mystery at all: we discover she’s dead so early on I don’t even consider it a spoiler, and the cause of her death is shoehorned in at the end in a really nonsense way.
I was really disappointed by this novel and in Morton, who has such a stellar reputation for historical fiction. Obviously, the cover is gorgeous. The writing style has immense potential and the setting of Birchwood Manor did feel vivid and alive. But when a novel falters and dies on both plot and character development, it’s almost impossible to resuscitate.
blog review
I really enjoyed Kate Morton’s books. They always have a twist at the end and when it’s over you feel like you’ve lost a good friend
This is a complex story beginning with the discovery of a satchel containing a sketchbook and photograph of an unknown young woman that dates back a hundred and fifty years. Recognizing one of the sketches from a story her mother told, Elodie, a young archivist, is compelled to solve the mystery. The story delves deeper and deeper, bringing characters to life from the past. Slowly, the Clockmaker’s daughter is revealed in layer after layer of connection between a house and the lives of individuals who were changed forever by love, loss, and time. I listened to this on audible and the narrator, Joanne Froggatt, was extraordinary.
I loved this book and could hardly put it down. It has romance, fantasy, lost loves and much more. I am really glad I read this book. It was a historical story, also. I was engrossed from the very beginning. This is the first book by this author that I have read but it certainly won’t be the last.
The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton is both a historical and contemporary novel about love and loss, and the impact through time as the novel covers a span of 150 years.
As with all Kate Morton’s stories, it is beautifully told with a poignancy that leaves the reader feeling serene, knowing we have been in the presence of a great love.
It is this great love that infuses a house and all the intersecting lives down the years. It is a great love that is drawn to certain people at a certain time in their lives. It is a great love that will impact all the lives that it intersects with. This is a love that lives where it has always felt happiest.
The house in the tale almost becomes a character in its own right as it draws the lost and lonely towards its walls. It is a house where hope lives. “He’d lost his way but hope still fluttered in and out.”
There is a great loss within the novel. It is a loss from which one does not recover. Other losses occur and they produce survivor’s guilt. “The guilt of the sibling survivor.” Guilt has the power to trap us in the past. We “must forgive oneself the past or else the journey into the future becomes unbearable.”
Over the course of the novel the reader meets a great many characters as we learn their stories. Everyone will have their favourites. For me, I loved both Tip and the voice that is the constant down the years.
The novel is a work of great beauty. There are some books that you never want to end – and this is one such book.
I received this book for free. A favourable review was not required and all views expressed are my own.
A slow start, but keep with it. It makes you think, I didn’t anticipate the ending right away, and I fell in love with the characters and the story that they each separately had to tell. I will read this one again, and again, and again!
I never knew a ghost story could make me feel anything other than terror. A wonderfully tragic love story.
I loved this book. The shifting back and forth of eras and characters was very well done. The characters were well formed and the story kept me engaged all the way through.
Starts off well but gets lost in a maze of characters needed serious editing. Sorry life is too short for this book
I have read all of her books and they were great, this one made no sense and was very disjointed. Horrible.
I gave this book four stars because the plot and characters were convoluted.
In Morton style this book was full of beautiful character development and throughly descriptive scenes. Beautifully written, engaging story line and a fine finish. That being said it was quite a way into the book before the threads of the story came together.
Too long and too many characters over too long a period in time.