Pinpricks Of Light

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.

JULIA WILSON