The Unwilding

I enjoyed Nightingale when I read it a few years ago and Marina Kemp’s second book has eventually crossed my path and I’m glad it did.

The book starts in a pretty unassuming manner. The setting is a villa in Sicily where the family of the acclaimed novelist Don Travers holiday each summer. The narrative mostly belongs to his youngest daughter, Nemony, who is ten years old. As well as the Travers family the villa has numerous literary guests who have been invited to spend time with them. There’s a lot of interesting things going on - Nemony’s mother Lydia is obviously not part of the literary party, and there’s a crowd of teenagers who Nemony can watch without quite understanding. Then part of the story is also told through the eyes of Zoe, a young but successful writer who is one of the guests. She’s also a bit of an outsider watching the proceedings.

Just when you’re not quite sure where this is all going you get plucked away from Sicily and plonked down in London twenty years later. And this is where the story really gets interesting as you join together the tangle of threads from the earlier setting and watch how they are woven or how they fray now the characters are older.

The book felt really rather generic in the beginning but the second half of it was fabulous and needed the historical family background to make it seem credulous. Definitely a good read and puts Marina Kemp firmly on my list of authors to watch out for.