Lily: A Tale of Revenge from the Sunday Times bestselling author

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Or she goes back to Rookery Farm where she lives the rest of her life pretty much the same as it used to be - with everyone around and full of love. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. But the very best thing about this meaty novel, which I liked so much that I gobbled it in two days, is the ending. Yet, memories of her time in the foundation and a need to understand her origins underpin her daily life.

I should confess that, against all of my cynical expectations, I found it very moving and, in my head, immediately speculated on a possible sequence. Other than this it is a great read and recommended unless you are already feeling a bit down in the dumps! Chequered as it was, the history of the Foundling Hospital offers a wealth of extraordinary life stories. A film adaptation of her 2016 novel The Gustav Sonata (an ode to friendship, set in post-WWII Switzerland) is also in development.We’re in favourite author territory here; Rose Tremain’s novels and short stories have been a reliable pleasure for many years, and her latest, Lily, is no exception. Not everyone who works in such places, however, is as good-hearted as their founders, and harsh punishment and cruelty, then as now, were not uncommon.

Post-recovery, her memories of hospital are fragmented yet gruelling; she mentions how she became unable to eat and dangerously underweight, and how her co-ordination was so shot that she struggled to sign her name. One of the most breathtakingly captivating and exquisitely spun pieces of storytelling I've read in a long time' Caroline K.Her celebrated novel Restoration (1989) portrayed the decadent reign of Charles II – and the misadventures of her rambunctious anti-hero Robert Merivel – as a response to 1980s Western materialism. A further cruel feature of the system is the way the foundlings are regarded as being the ‘carriers’ of the sins of their mothers – not their fathers, note.

Lily is not a joyful, bawdy, Dickensian romp, replete with cheeky cockney clichés and rosy-cheeked orphans. In particular, the murder and Lily's obsession with being found out didn't feel high stakes enough to hold the plot together.the book is split between lily's pov as an adult and pov as a child and I def preferred her pov as a child because of this. The whole story about the lady making religious figurines who Lily thinks could be her mother was also pointless. Instead what I got was 150 pages before I even found out what the murder was and where it happened and soon after the reader learns that although the policeman believes it was murder, he wasn’t even investigating it. Subtitled ‘A Tale of Revenge’, t he narrative moves back and forth in time between Lily’s early years spent with a foster family, her time at the London Foundling Hospital and her subsequent employment at Belle Prettywood’s Wig Emporium.