I love gardens and nature and anything even remotely related to that, so to read a book called The Butterfly Garden was an inevitable choice for me, especially as it’s set in Suffolk, England - I live on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, so I was keen to see if I recognised any places. A dual timeline novel split between 1963 and 2018, where our female protagonists are Clara and Meredith, respectively. I was hooked as the story and all the family secrets jumped from one decade to another. Life and love are brought together as we read about Butterfly Cottage and why it was left empty for fifty years.
The Butterfly Garden is beautifully written, with so many gorgeous descriptions of the Suffolk countryside, the winding lanes and village life. I was invested from the very beginning.
Thank you to NetGalley, Boldwood Books and Rachel’s Random Resources for the opportunity to read and review The Butterfly Garden by Rachel Burton.
About the Book
1963: When Clara Samuels buys Butterfly Cottage, she knows the scandal she’ll cause. A single woman buying property is not the ‘done thing’, especially not in a village like Carybrook. But Clara has been in love with Butterfly Cottage, and its garden, since she used to play there before the War. And when she reconnects with her childhood friend James, her decision feels serendipitous. But the true scandal is yet to come, because within six months, Clara will leave England under mysterious circumstances, and Butterfly Cottage will stand empty for more than 50 years.
2018: No one is more surprised than Meredith when she’s bequeathed a cottage by a great aunt she’d never heard of. She hopes, briefly, that the inheritance could be the answer to her financial problems. But when she arrives in Suffolk, she is shocked to discover a man is already living there. A young gardener, who claims he was also bequeathed half of Butterfly Cottage.
As the pair try to unravel their complicated situation, they unearth a decades old mystery involving Clara, the garden, and a stack of letters left unread for over 50 years…
About Rachel
Rachel Burton is the bestselling author of historical timeslip novels and has previously written romantic comedies.
Rachel was born in Cambridge and grew up in a house full of books and records. She has read obsessively since she first realised those black squiggles on the pages that lined her parents’ bookshelves were actually words and it has gone down in family history that any time something interesting happened, she missed it because she had her nose in a book.
After reading for a degree in Classics and another in English Literature she accidentally fell into a career in law but her love of books prevailed as she realised that she wanted to slip into imaginary worlds of her own making. She eventually managed to write her first novel on her lunch breaks.
She is obsessed with old houses and the secrets they keep, with abandoned gardens and locked gates, with family histories and surprising revelations, and with the outcomes of those surprises many generations later.
She lives in Yorkshire with her husband, a variety of cats and far too many books. By writing novels she now has an excuse for her head being forever in the clouds.
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