Emma's Bookish Lifestyle

The Two Houses by Fran Cooper The Two Houses sit grey and brooding beneath a pale sky. They cling to the hillside, cowering from the wind, because always, before everything up here, there is the wind. The Two Houses were not always two. But if it is human to build - even up here, in this blasted northern hinterland - it is human to break, too. After an acclaimed career in ceramics, Jay herself has cracked. Recovering from a breakdown, she and her husband Simon move to the desolate edges of the north of England, where they find and fall in love with the Two Houses: a crumbling property whose central rooms were supposedly so haunted that a previous owner had them cut out from the building entirely. But on uprooting their city life and moving to the sheltered grey village of Hestle, Jay and Simon discover it's not only the Two Houses that seems to be haunted by an obscure past. It becomes increasingly clear that the villagers don't want them there at all - and wh...

These Dividing Walls   by Fran Cooper My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars During the course of one hot summer in the back streets of the left bank of Paris, in number 37 Rue des Eglantines a building holds the stories, solitude and secrets of it’s residents lives. Within the confines of their homes people are unaware that soon the things that divide them will collapse and they will all be affected by the events of that heady summer. Into this summer comes Edward Rivers, an Englishman with his own story taking an attic room from a friend, Emilie in her Aunt Frederique’s building to give him an escape, time to grieve the loss of a loved one. Immediately upon reading this book there is an intrinsic feeling of the quaint back streets of Paris that at times feel more claustrophobic than quaint, especially through the course of the characters stories, this was due to the growing intensity of the events instilling an ever deepening dark mood along with the taut heat of the summer. At tim...