Synopsis

In 1916 1st Lieutenant Robert Lovett is a patient at Coldbrook Hall military hospital in Sussex, England. A gifted artist, he’s been wounded fighting in the Great War. Shell shocked and suffering from hysterical blindness he can no longer see his own face, let alone paint, and life seems increasingly hopeless.

A century later in 2017, medical student Louisa Casson has just lost her beloved grandmother – her only family. Heartbroken, she drowns her sorrows in alcohol on the South Downs cliffs – only to fall accidentally part-way down. Doctors fear she may have attempted suicide, and Louisa finds herself involuntarily admitted to Coldbrook Hall – now a psychiatric hospital, an unfriendly and chaotic place.

Then one day, while secretly exploring the old Victorian hospital’s ruined, abandoned wing, Louisa hears a voice calling for help, and stumbles across a dark, old-fashioned hospital room. Inside, lying on the floor, is a mysterious, sightless young man, who tells her he was hurt at the Battle of the Somme, a WW1 battle a century ago. And that his name is Lieutenant Robert Lovett…

Two people, two battles: one against the invading Germans on the battlefields of 1916 France, the other against a substandard, uncaring mental health facility in modern-day England. Two journeys begun a century apart, but somehow destined to coincide – and become one desperate struggle to be together.

For fans of Diana Gabaldon, Amy Harmon, Beatriz Williams, Kate Quinn, Kristin Hannah, Kate Morton, Susanna Kearsley and Paullina Simons.

*NB This novel contains graphic descriptions of war violence and injuries, as well as profanity and mild sex.

Available to read on Kindle Unlimited

Review

This book is for fans of historical fiction, time travel/timeslip, and romance.

Louisa lives in the present, 2017 to be exact.  Life has been hard and she has just lost her grandmother and ends up in a psychiatric hospital by mistake due to the ineffective doctors.  Robert lives in 1915 and is an artist but has a strong sense of duty to his country and serves in the military.  By some weird fluke, Louisa ends up back in 1915-16 and meets Robert who is recovering from some injuries.  What neither expects is to find the love of their life but only one knows what separates them….time.

For most of this book, I was more interested in Louisa’s story.  The disbelief that someone in this time period could be stuck in a psychiatric hospital and basically ignores her explanations of what happened is shocking.  And the hospital that she is in is like something from the 1950s.  There are a bunch of extreme cases, the nurses don’t seem to care, and the doctors must be filling some sort of quota and appear to only care about prescribing drugs that may be ineffective for the patient.  It helps Louisa that she was previously in med school before her grandmother died.  On the flip side, one would think that studying medicine and working on cadavers would toughen a person up so that when having to work on live patients it is no big deal.  Of course, it is very different to work on someone that is alive versus dead.  But Louisa has moxie and is able to adapt to the past easier than some.

Robert is tough but has a sensitive side.  His injuries hold him back but meeting Louisa reshapes his thought process and allows him to heal.  Reading the details of the various battles and POW camps can be a tough read if you are remotely squeamish.  But it gave me a better understanding of the war and what soldiers endured for freedom.

I’m not 100% sure how Louisa managed to go between the two time periods.  I understand time travel but most of the books in this genre don’t have a character going back and forth in time.  But it was intriguing to see how the author wove this into the story to keep the reader engaged.

The romance/love story between Robert and Louisa is one that stood the test of time.  I enjoyed watching their relationship progress and while it wasn’t always easy, they made it work.

This book was very enjoyable and I had a hard time putting it down because I wanted to know what was going to happen next for Robert and Louisa.

We give this book 4 paws up.

Excerpt

High Wood, mid-July 1916

It was beautiful; so unexpectedly and profoundly perfect that he felt his heart might break. Robert looked out over the cornfield at High Wood, tears spilling down his cheeks, surprised he still had the ability to cry. Perhaps there was something in him that was still human after all. A little way behind stood Private Nesbitt, his signaller. The two of them had come out in advance to assess the lie of the land.

The breeze brushed softly through the ripening ears of corn, as if for the simple pleasure of feeling them part. And the corn, in turn, seemed to shiver with pleasure at its touch. There was scarcely a shell hole to be seen. Nearby, a song thrush spilled its joyous tune. It was warm, the sky mostly overcast, but every now and then a shaft of sunlight broke through and gilded the landscape and heated the back of his neck. Only the distant boom of the guns gave away the fact they were still at the front.

He closed his eyes, drank in the silence. He could almost be back at home in the fields of his boyhood, tramping through the thigh-high buttercups with a jam jar, catching beetles and pretending not to hear Cook at the bottom of the garden calling him back in for lunch. He could scarcely believe he’d ever been that boy. That time increasingly seemed like a fantasy dreamt up by someone else.

It was just two weeks since the great offensive had kicked off, but he felt he’d aged a lifetime. His battalion had been sent further down the line, south of the Albert to Bapaume road, where the attack had been a bit more successful on the first of July. There, the British had not only taken a little ground but held it – albeit at great cost. Now Sir Douglas Haig wanted to exploit the gains. Things had gone well so far that morning. Instead of a long preliminary bombardment proclaiming loudly to all and sundry the fact that the British were coming, there’d been a short, lightning bombardment. Under cover of darkness, they’d been able to take the Germans by surprise and turf them out of three miles of their own second line. Luck had, for once, been on their side. Now they must press their advantage and advance further. There were no two ways about it. This time they simply had to succeed.

‘Here.’ Robert tossed back a packet of Woodbines. He always kept some. They calmed the men’s nerves in a tight spot. He lit himself a Turkish cigarette, then threw back the matches. Normally, he’d have struck the match for the man himself, but his hands were very unsteady.

‘Sit down, Nesbitt,’ Robert said, wiping the dust from his eyes. ‘I think we’ve earned a breather, don’t you?’

Nesbitt was a Kitchener’s Army volunteer. He was twenty-one and had worked in a greengrocer’s shop in Kent. He kept making involuntary frowning movements and his breath came quick and rough, like a saw rasping through wood.

‘Not long now and we’ll be in billets behind the line,’ said Robert, trying to sound reassuring. ‘You did well this morning, Nesbitt. The whole company did splendidly.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Nesbitt looked up at him like a child, frightened but trusting. Best to keep him close by, Robert thought, or he might simply disappear off into the woods. He’d be far from the first to lose his nerve and desert, and several had been shot for it.

But Robert could understand the lure of escape. These new men were all civilians, just like he’d once been – farmhands, miners, postmen, chandlers. They’d come to France fired up by vague and noble ideas of ‘doing their bit’, hoping for adventure and a hero’s welcome back home to boot – only to find themselves tossed like dry sticks into the scorching furnace of the Somme. How many of those he’d taken over the top on that appalling first day now lay dead, their bodies filling out the bloated stomachs of the rats and flies of Picardy?

‘Have you anyone waiting for you at home, Private?’ Robert asked. ‘Anyone special?’

‘Just my mum and sister, sir.’

Robert knew that already, of course, from censoring the man’s letters. ‘Dearest Mother, dearest Ruby, all is well with me,’ Nesbitt would always begin. He wasn’t the sort to complain about his lot; few of them were. ‘We’re in a nice, quiet sector here, so you’re not to worry . . . ’

Robert nodded. ‘Well, I dare say there’ll be a letter or two waiting for you when the post arrives.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He trained his field glasses on High Wood. How wonderful it was to see trees again: tall and glorious as nature had made them, unmarked by war, the wind sifting through their leaves – not mutilated stumps, eerie forests of stark telegraph poles. And here there was no hideous background drone of billions of flies feasting on the bloated black flesh of the fallen, reheated every morning by the sun.

There wasn’t the least sign of activity. Had the Germans been driven out? He hardly dared to hope so. But if so then finally, finally they might be on the verge of the breakthrough that had eluded them. If they could take High Wood, they could cut through the German lines, and the advantage, for the first time, would be theirs. The Big Push and all the unspeakable bloody shambles of the last two weeks wouldn’t have been all for nothing.

‘We’ll go on a bit further and take a look,’ he said.

Nesbitt got to his feet.

‘Stay low,’ Robert ordered, feeling for his gun.

About the Author

Catherine Taylor was born and grew up on the island of Guernsey in the British Channel Islands. She is a former journalist, most recently for Dow Jones News and The Wall Street Journal in London. Beyond The Moon is her first novel. She lives in Ealing, London with her husband and two children.

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