#BlogTour-‘The Missing Years’ by Lexie Elliott

About the book…

A Goodreads ‘Mover and Shaker’ for summer 2019

She thought she would never go back…

Ailsa Calder has inherited half of a house. The other half belongs to a man who disappeared without a trace twenty-seven years ago. Her father.

Leaving London behind to settle her mother’s estate, Ailsa returns to her childhood home nestled amongst the craggy peaks of the Scottish Highlands, accompanied by the half-sister she’s never taken the time to get to know.

With the past threatening to swallow her whole, she can’t escape the claustrophobic feeling that the house itself is watching her. And when Ailsa confronts the first nighttime intruder, she sees that the manor’s careless rugged beauty could cost her everything…

Massive thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Book tours for the blog tour invite for ‘The Missing Years’ by Lexie Elliott. Published by Atlantic Books , imprint, Corvus,The Missing Years’ is available in ebook and paperback from the 6th June wherever excellent fiction is sold!

Following her fantastic debut novel,‘The French Girl’, Lexie Elliott ramps up her mastery of the psychological thriller with ‘The Missing Years’. Main character and protagonist, Ailsa, is a journalist who has been in a relationship with a newscaster for a decade .Never really ‘official’, leaving both to do their own thing, Ailsa describes her relationship thus-

‘There are versions of him ,ones that nobody sees but me. Or whoever was there before me,or whoever might come after. Perpetual bachelor:he shouldn’t be considered as such,given we’ve been together for nigh in a decade. But I know that’s how everyone thinks of him.I am presumed to be a barnace on the hull that will at some point be scraped off whilst the ship itself blithely forges on.’

How I love that description! And this is what Lexie Elliott does so well, she says so very much in a succinct sentence that you revel in  her words, her characters, and sink into the world she creates like an enveloping cushion that you do not want to leave .

*aside-I burnt at least 2 meals whilst reading this and my word of the week was ‘Uh-huh’ whilst reading this*

There is little about The Manse which is comforting, it is as if Ailsa has inherited a house that gives all the appearance of a family seat with none of the associated memories.

Her mother has left her a bitter bequest-half of the house Ailsa grew up in but she cannot sell it without the permission of her father, the same person who walked out when Ailsa was a child and never returned.

Even the name of the house suggests darkness and remoteness,’The Manse’.

Located in the middle of Scotland, Ailsa returns there with her half sister from her mother , Carrie, trying to establish a relationship that never really got started in a house that both i,s and isn’t, hers.

Ailsa’s chapters are interspersed with paragraphs of what Ailsa imagines her father could be doing, if he he is still alive, and this is the core of the novel,why did he leave and what happened to him?

How reliable are memories and what is being hidden from Ailsa?

Her job as a journalist makes her inquistive and different, she needs to find her father but what will the consequences be? Will the reality of what has, or hasn’t happened to her father be better or worse than anything she has imagined?

She is suddenly living in place where people who are complete strangers have more memories of her father than she does, and her arrival stirs up gossip like nothing else.

And looming over it all is The Manse…

A slow burning read which demands your full attention, I absolutely recommend this thrilling read, it’s the kind of book that gives you chills even when you are reading it in broad daylight!

About the author…

Lexie Elliott has been writing for as long as she can remember, but she began to focus on it more seriously after she lost her banking job in 2009 due to the Global Financial Crisis. After some success in short story competitions, she began planning a novel. With two kids and a (new) job, it took some time for that novel to move from her head to the page, but the result was ‘‘The French Girl’, which is out now!

When she’s not writing, Lexie can be found running, swimming or cycling whilst thinking about writing. In 2007 she swam the English Channel solo. She won’t be doing that again. In 2015 she ran 100km, raising money for Alzheimer Scotland. She won’t be doing that again either. But the odd triathlon or marathon isn’t out of the question.
Links-
www.lexieelliott.com
http://www.facebook.com/lexieelliottwrites

Twitter @elliott_lexie