Why am I passionate about this?
My instinct as a writer is to have two timelines. Having set up a story now my natural instinct is to dive back into the past to see why. My father was always taking us around ruins and castles and battlefields, I grew up reading history. It helps me to write if I try to put myself there, in a character’s shoes and clothes, surrounded by the smells and words and motivations from the past. Immersing myself in the past feels like going to an exotic location. I hope you enjoy visiting the timelines in these novels.
Rebecca's book list on where past and present collide
Why did Rebecca love this book?
This book moved me. This book expertly tells a single story but from each end. One timeline travels back from 1981, as Georgy watches over his dying wife, Zoya. The poignancy of these two old people, still in love, still themselves spoke to me. The other timeline follows him from early childhood through Romanov Russia, as nine-year-old Georgy saves the life of the tsar’s cousin. The relationship grows between the main characters, told back and forth, revealing layers of connection and history between them. The two strands end at the shocking revelation of the ‘special purpose.’ I enjoyed the mystery but fell in love with the characters, and the wonderful settings. The two timelines added powerfully to the reading of the story.
1 author picked The House of Special Purpose as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In Russia during the year 1915, at the age of 16, Georgy Jachmenev steps in front of an assassin's bullet intended for the heart of a senior member of the Russian Imperial Family. He is instantly proclaimed a hero. Before the week is out, his life as the son of a peasant farmer is changed forever when he is escorted to St Petersburg to take up his new position - as bodyguard to Alexei Romanov, the only son of Tsar Nicholas II. Sixty five years later, visiting his wife Zoya as she lies dying in a London hospital, memories of…