BLOG TOUR: Never Closer - Margot Shepherd

On an ordinary day in 2017, Jo receives a phone call about her 18-year-old daughter, Jessie. It is the call that every parent dreads. In 1940, 17-year-old Alice ties on her facemask and enters a laboratory to harvest a potential new miracle drug called penicillin. The lives of these women become entwined when Jo finds Alice’s diary in a vintage handbag. Past and present overlap and merge as life-changing events resonate for them all across the gulf of time.

This is a story about a diary opening a door on the past, chronicling a young woman’s determination to succeed against all odds, while unknowingly inspiring others to step into a better life. Set against the backdrop of the Second World War, the infancy of antibiotics and a modern medical emergency and its consequences, it not only reminds us how fortunate we are to live now, but also serves as a stark warning about the fragility of life and the dangers of complacency.

 

What did I think?

Oh wow!  What a debut from Margot Shepherd!  I had to actually double check that Never Closer was a debut as it is so beautifully written.  I don't think I can even begin to tell you how much I enjoyed Never Closer and no review I write could really do it justice, but I'll try my best.

The dual timelines in the story are both riveting and I love that the past storyline is told via an old diary that Jo finds in her friend's vintage shop.  Jo didn't realise how linked her life would be to Alice's until her daughter battles for her life against a deadly infection.  An infection that would have claimed many more lives if it wasn't for Alice's work harvesting penicillin in 1940.

I loved the story of penicillin and it's so sad that Alexander Fleming's name is the only one that springs to mind when you think of this life saving drug.  Yes, Fleming discovered it but he did nothing with it and it's only thanks to the work of Professor Howard Florey and the ‘penicillin girls’ that we have access to penicillin today.  If only Fleming had taken a few more steps to further his discovery into development, so many more lives could have been saved especially during World War II.

Captivating, immersive and thought-provoking, Never Closer is an unforgettable book that I will be recommending for a long time to come.  Blending historical fact with enthralling fiction, Margot Shepherd is an exciting new voice in historical fiction and definitely one to place on my watch list.  Very highly recommended - don't miss this book, historical fiction fans!

I received a gifted paperback to read and review for the blog tour and this is my honest and unbiased opinion.

My rating:

Buy it from Amazon

About the author:

Margot Shepherd is a British author who was born in Yorkshire where she spent her childhood. She now lives in rural Sussex with her husband and Springer Spaniel, Genni. When she’s not writing she works in medical research at the University of Surrey. She writes about family relationships with a particular emphasis on women and science from a female point of view.

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The Waiting Rooms - Eve Smith

Swinging from South Africa to England: one woman’s hunt for her birth mother in an all-too-believable near future in which an antibiotic crisis has decimated the population. A prescient, thrilling debut.

Decades of spiralling drug resistance have unleashed a global antibiotic crisis. Ordinary infections are untreatable, and a scratch from a pet can kill. A sacrifice is required to keep the majority safe: no one over seventy is allowed new antibiotics. The elderly are sent to hospitals nicknamed ‘The Waiting Rooms’ … hospitals where no one ever gets well.

Twenty years after the crisis takes hold, Kate begins a search for her birth mother, armed only with her name and her age. As Kate unearths disturbing facts about her mother’s past, she puts her family in danger and risks losing everything. Because Kate is not the only secret that her mother is hiding. Someone else is looking for her, too.

Sweeping from an all-too-real modern Britain to a pre-crisis South Africa, The Waiting Rooms is epic in scope, richly populated with unforgettable characters, and a tense, haunting vision of a future that is only a few mutations away.

What did I think?

Maybe during a global pandemic wasn't the best time to read a book with a similar setting, as The Waiting Rooms scared the bejesus out of me!  Although I think even without the current crisis, The Waiting Rooms is so scarily realistic that you can easily imagine it happening.  

The Waiting Rooms is set in past and present and told from the viewpoints of Lily, Mary and Kate.  In the present day, Lily is living in a residential home and approaching her 70th birthday, however, 70 is not an age to be celebrated in this dystopian Britain as that is the age from which antibiotics are no longer given making even the smallest infection fatal.  Kate is a nurse and just beginning the search for her birth mother after the death of her adoptive mother.  The key to both Lily and Kate's lives is in the past as we read about Mary who is a research scientist looking at healing properties of plants in South Africa before becoming involved in a scandal that rocked the medical world.

Eve Smith has written such an exceptional novel that it left me completely gobsmacked.  I really shouldn't have been shocked but I was totally floored to discover how much of The Waiting Rooms is based on actual medical research.  It's so scarily believable that it's giving me goosebumps just thinking about it now.  This is a book that should have been way beyond its time but instead has been released at a time when it's as real as watching the news.

Hard-hitting, thought-provoking and scarily realistic, The Waiting Rooms should be on everyone's bookshelf.  This is absolutely outstanding writing from Eve Smith; it's almost as if her predictions have come true so I'm both fascinated and terrified to read what she writes next.  So highly recommended, The Waiting Rooms is a definite MUST read.

I chose to read an ARC and this is my honest and unbiased opinion.

My rating:

Buy it from Amazon