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Book Reviewed by:In this haunting novel, a young nurse forms an unlikely connection with the elderly man she cares for, and finds herself confronting the guilt she carries from her past.
Marguerite Demers is twenty-five when she leaves Paris for the sleepy southern village of Saint Sulpice to take up a job as a live-in nurse. Her charge is Jerome Lanvier--once one of the most powerful men in the village, now dying alone in his large and secluded house surrounded by rambling neglected gardens. Manipulative and tyrannical, Jerome has scared away all of his previous caretakers.
It's not long before the villagers have formed opinions of Marguerite. Brigitte Brochon, pillar of the community and local busybody, finds her arrogant and mysterious and is desperate to find a reason to have her fired. Glamorous outsider Suki Lacourse sees Marguerite as an ally in a sea of small-minded provincialism. Local farmer Henri Brochon, husband of Brigitte, feels sorry for her and wants to protect her from the villagers' intrusive gossip and speculation (but Henri has a secret of his own that would scandalize his neighbors, if only they knew). The sudden arrival of Jerome's three sons will upend the rhythm of their days, changing their lives forever.
Set among the lush fields and olive groves of southern France, and written in clear prose of luminous beauty, Marguerite is an unforgettable novel that traces the ways in which guilt can be transformed, and how people can unexpectedly find a sense of redemption.
The prose remains assured throughout, with particular praise owed to the sharp dialogue. Kemp has a knack for human observation, perfectly capturing the fraught mood between each of the multifaceted characters as they seek to unburden themselves of their hidden pain while maintaining their standing within the community. Through the gradual unraveling of the tangled web that ensnares them all, we see that no one can ever truly be free while they continue to suffer beneath the weight of the past...continued
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(Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin).
Marina Kemp's Marguerite operates on several thematic levels; not least as an homage to classics of gothic literature. Like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw before it, the novel opens with a young woman arriving at a large, secluded country house, before documenting her increasingly futile attempts to break free from the burden of the past and make said house her home.
Kemp is not the first contemporary author to draw heavily on this motif. Susan Fletcher's House of Glass, Laura Purcell's The Silent Companions and Alice Thompson's The Book Collector are just a few comparative examples. But what is it about this setup that continues to attract and enthrall authors and ...
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