The Clockmaker's Daughter
A Novel
-
-
4.1 • 600 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From the author of the New York Times bestseller Homecoming—“An ambitious, compelling historical mystery with a fabulous cast of characters…Kate Morton at her very best.” —Kristin Hannah
“An elaborate tapestry…Morton doesn’t disappoint.” —The Washington Post
"Classic English country-house Goth at its finest." —New York Post
In the depths of a 19th-century winter, a little girl is abandoned on the streets of Victorian London. She grows up to become in turn a thief, an artist’s muse, and a lover. In the summer of 1862, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, she travels with a group of artists to a beautiful house on a bend of the Upper Thames. Tensions simmer and one hot afternoon a gunshot rings out. A woman is killed, another disappears, and the truth of what happened slips through the cracks of time. It is not until over a century later, when another young woman is drawn to Birchwood Manor, that its secrets are finally revealed.
Told by multiple voices across time, this is an intricately layered, richly atmospheric novel about art and passion, forgiveness and loss, that shows us that sometimes the way forward is through the past.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In Kate Morton’s time-jumping ghost story, the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman in the 1860s reverberates into the 21st century. Shifting seamlessly between a group of young bohemian artists during Victorian times and a present-day London archivist determined to unravel their fate, the author of The Lake House creates a moving story of ambition and loss. Morton makes multiple nods to Dickens throughout The Clockmaker’s Daughter, and her zippy plot machinations and colorful side characters would make her inspiration proud.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Morton (The Lake House) explores the tangled history of people and place in her outstanding, bittersweet sixth novel. In contemporary London, Elodie, a young archivist, encounters among her employer's collection a satchel, a photographic portrait, and a sketch of a country house. The sketch, in particular, arouses Elodie's professional curiosity and her memories, since it bears close resemblance to a house figuring heavily in the magical stories her late mother once told her. The trail of Elodie's research spurred by her discovery that the sketch depicts an actual place is woven together with tales of the house's various denizens between 1862 and the present, as well as with the voice of a spirit who haunts its walls. This specter who remains nameless for most of the novel is the clock maker's daughter of the title, abandoned as a young girl, trained as a pickpocket, and eventually chosen as an artist's muse, but possessing an artist's eye of her own. The novel's central mystery focuses on the circumstances of her abrupt disappearance in the 19th century, entangled with the abduction of a priceless jewel, the murder of the artist's fianc e, and the artist's personal and professional collapse. At the novel's emotional core, however, is the intersection of lives across decades, united, as the ethereal narrator suggests, by a shared experience of "loss that ties them together." In addition to love not only romantic love but also love between parents and siblings and loss, the stories, brilliantly told by Morton, offer musings on art, betrayal, and the ways in which real lives and real places can evolve over time into the stuff of legends.
Customer Reviews
Good but takes some work to follow
This was a difficult book to get “into” - so many time changes and characters that seemed completely independent. I kept with it and when I read the statement by Birdie about jumbled jigsaw pieces from countless puzzles collected over time, I realized that this described the book. The addition of the Chronology of Birchwood Manor at the end of the book finally helped me connect some of the “puzzle” pieces. Not all was resolved at the end of the book, but that was okay - I am happy to make my own ending or … perhaps, there will be a sequel.
I wanted to love!
I’m a big Kate Morton fan and own several of her books. Many of them begin by introducing characters and events that only make sense later, but this one, as one reviewer mentioned, contained a lot of “fluff.” I found myself skipping pages, only to realize I could skip even more without feeling as though I had missed anything important.
Multiple character perspectives can either propel a story forward or leave the reader feeling overwhelmed and perplexed. Eventually, I found myself simply wanting to get to the point. I gave it three stars because the story itself was genuinely interesting, but I just couldn’t become invested enough to savor every page. Because the story was such a long, meandering build-up, by the end the reveal simply didn’t hit with the impact it seemed intended to have.
The conclusion felt abrupt, almost as though the editor recognized that the plot was inventive but that the author needed to bring it to an end somewhere.
It was interesting until
The endless backstories that unnecessary.