“Goodbyes were left unsaid, alongside a multitude of lingering regrets.” 💔
The Long Way Home is February's read for @hook.me.a.book and the #kindlecrushchallenge, and what a delightful book it was to finally read. Set between 1950s Paris 🇫🇷 and 2019 UK 🇬🇧, I loved the adventures Isla’s Mum got up to as a young girl working and living in Paris, and the investigative journey Isla and her granddaughter Charlie navigated back in the UK to finally uncover the answers she’d been searching for. 🔍✨
It’s rare to find a book with a main character in her sixties, but that’s exactly what we get here — and it was so refreshing 🤍 I especially loved watching Isla and her teenage granddaughter’s relationship grow, as Charlie slowly realises there’s more to life than her mobile phone. 📱💫
I’ll definitely be seeking out more books by Fanny Blake 📖 It was a heartwarming, easy read that I’d happily recommend.
A very belated thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster UK for the opportunity to read and review The Long Way Home by Fanny Blake. 🙏✨
About the Book
When Isla, a 65-year-old grandmother, is left nothing but an old painting in her mother’s will, while her sisters and aunt inherit the estate, she is devastated. Close to retirement, getting ready to live on her own terms, the last thing she expects at this time of her life is such turmoil. So, to find an explanation for her mother’s rejection, she embarks on a road-trip.
But, right at the last moment, she’s forced to take her sullen – and, in her view, impossible – 14-year-old granddaughter Charlie with her. Cramped together in Isla’s car with her smelly old dog, these ill-assorted travelling companions set off to uncover some shattering and life-changing family truths at the same time as learning to love each other…
About Fanny - by Fanny
I was brought up in Nottinghamshire, then went to Edinburgh university to study French and Spanish. I left there certain that I wanted to be a publisher’s editor. I hadn’t a clue what editors did. I loved reading: that was enough.
After a short stint in Glasgow, working in the university bookshop (the closest I could get to the world of books), I left Scotland and came to London in search of a job. I answered an advertisement from Corgi Books and was appointed as an editorial assistant. From there I went to Star Books, Granada Books and then was appointed senior fiction editor at Penguin where I stayed for fourteen years, interrupted by a three year interlude during which I was publishing director of Heinemann then editorial director of Macmillan. So I spent many happy years, acquiring, editing and publishing fiction and general non-fiction.
Eventually, I crossed to the other side of the fence. Instead of reading for my living, I began to write. After cutting my teeth with various interiors magazines, I was asked to collaborate on books that tied in with TV programmes such as Grand Designs, House Doctor and Place in the Sun. At about the same time, I was asked to be books editor of Woman & Home magazine, a job that to this day keeps me in touch with the world of books and publishing. Since then I have ghosted a number of celebrity autobiographies before turning my hand to fiction, where my heart has always lain.
Over the years, I’ve also enjoyed judging a number of literary awards, including the Betty Trask Award, the Desmond Elliott Award, the Romantic novelists’ Association Award, the Costa First Novel Award and the Costa Short Story Award
