The Moon, the Stars, and Madame Burova
A Novel
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4.7 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the wildly popular bestselling author of The Keeper of Lost Things—an uplifting, slightly magical story about how it’s never too late to find out who you really are.
"Ruth Hogan is the queen of uplifting fiction and Madame Burova reminds us why. The writing crackles with humor and warmth. I can't imagine a better book in which to lose yourself at the moment. Stunning, immersive and absolutely wonderful." --Annie Lyons, author of The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett
Madame Burova—beloved Tarot reader, palmist, and clairvoyant—is retiring and leaving her booth on the Brighton seafront.
After inheriting her mother’s fortune-telling business as a young woman, Imelda Burova has spent her life on the Brighton pier practicing her trade. She and her trusty pack of Tarot cards have seen the lovers and the liars, the angels and the devils, the dreamers and the fools. Now, after a lifetime of keeping other people’s secrets, Madam Burova is ready to have a little piece of life for herself. But she still has one last thing to do—to fulfill a promise made in the 1970s, when she and her girlfriends were carefree, with their whole lives still before them.
In London, it is time for another woman to make a fresh start. Billie has lost her university job, her marriage, and her place in the world when a sudden and unlikely discovery leaves her very identity in question. Determined to find answers, she must follow a trail…which leads to Brighton, the pier, and directly to Madame Burova’s door.
In a story spanning over fifty years, Ruth Hogan has conjured a magical world of 1970s holiday camps and seaside entertainers, eccentrics, heroes and villains, the lost and the found. Young people will make careless choices which echo down the years….but it’s never too late to put things right.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Hogan's engrossing latest (after The Wisdom of Sally Red Shoes), a middle-aged English woman searches for her biological parents. Forty-something Billie Marie, newly divorced, learns after her father dies that she was adopted. A letter he left behind instructs Billie to visit his old acquaintance Madame Burova, a tarot reader in the seaside city of Brighton, who happens to know all about Billie's origins and hands over a trust fund left for Billie by her biological mother, without revealing the mother's identity. Hogan then delves into Madame Burova's experiences as a young woman in 1970s Brighton, where she encounters such characters as spoiled and obnoxious Vivienne, who will stop at nothing to get what she wants; Treasure, who is bullied as a child for being biracial; eccentric Clive, who never forgets a face; and Cillian Byrne, the handsome daredevil who may or may not be Billie's biological father. As Hogan moves between past and present, Billie's asking around about the past in Brighton has consequences not just for Billie, but for others too. The omniscient narration ping-pongs through many points of view—even a dog's—which can become exhausting, but Hogan does a great job expanding on themes of friendship, racism, loyalty and love. With its trappings of a modern fairy tale, this one should have wide appeal.
