The Secrets of Saffron Hall

What a great discovery this writer, Clare Marchant,

so fond of English history to be able to write a wonderful novel in which fiction and reality intertwine in an excellent way.

The Secrets of Saffron Hall tells the story of two women:

- Amber, who in 2019 has temporarily moved to the big manor, Saffron Hall, where lives her grandpa, in order to take a year off and to take the reins of her life again after a terrible disgrace, and in the meanwhile she helps him in cataloguing and archiving the books in the enormous library;

- Eleanor, who lives in the Tudor period, during the great Church reforms of Henry VIII, who has to face the problems of such a transitional period, and who finds refuge and some peace in everything the monks taught her, such as growing and using officinal herbs, creating coloured inks and writing meticulously in a refined calligraphy, and mostly cultivating, packaging in loaves and using in cooking the extremely precious saffron.

These two women will share an unusual sad fate, and while the narration runs fast towards an exciting and moving ending, we hope till the end that they paradoxically succeed, with their different life stories, in helping each other, even though they are separated by five hundred years.

This reading has totally absorbed and intrigued me.

I desperately fell in love with a lot of characters and with the author, who managed to face a particularly delicate matter with gentleness and understanding, and sympathetically, but also with the spur to move on, always. Dum spiro, spero, “until I breathe, I have hope”: this is the motto of some of the protagonists of the novel and it is repeated like a mantra so many times that it can’t but become our motto too.

And now let’s get to the characters, so marvellous but so human nonetheless, with their flaws that make them believable, but who are able to win our hearts page by page:

- Eleanor, strong and stubborn, determined like a woman 

of her social class has to be, despite her young age, who also knows how to act sweetly with the people she loves.

- Amber, stubborn as well: anyway, we can’t but feel sympathy for her.

- Greville, super iper charming!

- Jane and Henry Lutton, so different from each other but equally adorable.

- young Tom, so sweet, whose tender character will prove an essential talent.

And then Jonathan with his incredible patience of a man who truly loves his woman; the loyalty of Eleanor’s friend, Joan, and the devotion of her butler, Hugh; Amber’s grandpa, a total fun; Becky’s sincere friendship and Pete’s charm.

I wish I never had to leave them, and, like sometimes it happens with books, I already miss these “friends” of mine and I even wish the story never ended.

Obviously I’ve already bought more novels of this fantastic writer.

Au revoir, mes amis! ;-D