My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In Kenya you've got the great birds and monkeys leaping through the trees overhead. It's a chance to remember what the world is really like.
----Joanna Lumley,
an English actress, voice-over artist, former model and author
Hannah Fielding, a French writer, enchanted my mind and heart, with her debut novel,
Burning Embers which is set across the lush green and golden landscape of Kenya.
Synopsis:
Coral Sinclair is a beautiful but naive twenty-five-year-old photographer who has just lost her father. She's leaving the life she's known and traveling to Kenya to take ownership of her inheritance--the plantation that was her childhood home--Mpingo. On the voyage from England, Coral meets an enigmatic stranger to whom she has a mystifying attraction. She sees him again days later on the beach near Mpingo, but Coral's childhood nanny tells her the man is not to be trusted. It is rumored that Rafe de Monfort, owner of a neighboring plantation and a nightclub, is a notorious womanizer having an affair with her stepmother, which may have contributed to her father's death.
Circumstance confirms Coral's worst suspicions, but when Rafe's life is in danger she is driven to make peace. A tentative romance blossoms amidst a meddling ex-fiancé, a jealous stepmother, a car accident, and the dangerous wilderness of Africa. Is Rafe just toying with a young woman's affections? Is the notorious womanizer only after Coral's inheritance? Or does Rafe's troubled past color his every move, making him more vulnerable than Coral could ever imagine?
I was lucky enough to read Fielding's latest novel,
The Echoes of Love , before reading her debut,
Burning Embers , and her latest is equally enthralling like her first book. In the first book, she paints the picture of a passionate and heart-touching love story set across the backdrop of African beauty, back in an era when Africa was a gold-digger's land.
Coral is a young English woman, who is also a passionate photographer, whereas Rafe is an old and cunning businessman, who happens to be a womanizer. And the author crafted them like some divine, rare and exotic species of the human race. The author flawlessly portrayed their perfect beauty and their inevitable attraction for each other. And yes, in a way, while I was reading about them, I felt passion in my mind and body. The story started with Coral's arrival in her father's estate in Kenya, and on her journey from England to Kenya, she met a handsome, tall and dark stranger who made her fall in love in the very first sight. However, upon her arrival, her old care-taker filled her heart with hatred for that mysterious man. The more she tried to stop thinking about Rafe, the more he became close to her own heart, and with each passing day, their attraction increased for each other, despite the rumors about Rafe's identity. And my friends, you need to read the rest of the story, to know how Coral gets adjusted with her heart and mind's tug-of-war.
The author created her characters strikingly, like every individual has something power in their demeanor to capture your attention as you read on.
But what kept me glued till the end was the author's writing! Her writing is something so exquisite and smooth that it pulls the strings of your heart into the core of the story. I moved along with her story, with the emotions, and with the nature! Africa welcomed me with it's open arms and I was completely lost into the African aura that the author created simply with words.
Not only the author captured the beauty and the golden soil of Kenya vividly into her story, but also she showed me the unexplored side of Africa- the tribes, the language, the food, the exotic and uninhibited culture, and oh-so-gorgeous African safari. It is not every day that you come across a tale- a simple tale, I must say, that enraptures your soul, mind and body with it's beauty.
Yes, to be honest, the love story is not any extraordinary tale that will bring out all the emotions out of you, but the way the author represented it, it'll bind to bring out every form of emotions out of your heart, but the exoticness of the whole story will absolutely intrigue you, amaze you and will keep you on your edges. Apart from that their is a mystery, that too keeps you turning the pages of the book and the author unfolded that mystery piece-by-piece. Moreover, there's a lesson in the end that enlightens our mind that how not to trust the word of mouth and to believe in what's in their heart.
Verdict: Read this book to feel the beauty of Kenya and to feel the passion of an captivating love-story.
Courtesy: Thanks to the author, Hannah Fielding, for giving me the opportunity to read and review her debut novel.
Other Review Links: Read here the review of Fielding's latest novel, The Echoes of Love.
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Author Info:
Hannah Fielding is a novelist, a dreamer, a traveler,
a mother, a wife and an incurable romantic. The seeds for her writing
career were sown in early childhood, spent in Egypt, when she came to an
agreement with her governess Zula: for each fairy story Zula told,
Hannah would invent and relate one of her own. Years later – following a
degree in French literature, several years of traveling in Europe,
falling in love with an Englishman, the arrival of two beautiful
children and a career in property development – Hannah decided after so
many years of yearning to write that the time was now. Today, she lives
the dream: she writes full time, splitting her time between her homes in
Kent, England, and the South of France, where she dreams up romances
overlooking breathtaking views of the Mediterranean.
Her first novel, Burning Embers,
is a vivid, evocative love story set against the backdrop of
tempestuous and wild Kenya of the 1970s, reviewed by one newspaper as
‘romance like Hollywood used to make’. Her new novel, The Echoes of Love,
is a story of passion, betrayal and intrigue set in the romantic and
mysterious city of Venice and the beautiful landscape of Tuscany.
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