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Title: The Companion

Author: Sarah Dunnakey

Narrator: Mike Rogers, Sherry Baines

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-27-17

Publisher: Orion

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

The Companion is a beautiful and powerfully told story of buried secrets, set between the 1930s and the present day on the wild Yorkshire moors.

Billy Shaw lives in a palace. Potter's Pleasure Palace, the best entertainment venue in Yorkshire, complete with dancing and swing-boats and picnickers and a roller-skating rink. Jasper Harper lives in the big house above the valley, with his eccentric mother, Edie, and Uncle Charles, brother and sister authors who have come from London to write in the seclusion of the moors. When it is arranged for Billy to become Jasper's companion, Billy arrives to find a wild, peculiar boy in a curiously haphazard household where nothing that's meant is said and the air is thick with secrets. Later, when Charles and Edie are found dead, it is ruled a double suicide, but fictions have become tangled up in facts, and it's left to Anna Sallis, almost a century later, to unravel the knots and piece together the truth.

Read by Sherry Baines and Mike Rogers.

Members Reviews:

Iâm thrilled I had the opportunity to read The Companion.

I was fortunate enough to be sent a hardback copy of The Companion and to me that has added to the atmospheric feel of the entire novel. The cover is haunting and the story that unravels within the pages intriguing.

This is told via two timelines .. Billy the young lad in the 1930âs is an absolute delight and I immediately fell under the spell of his Yorkshire dialect. He is from a poor family, his Ma and sisters run the tearooms at the old mill which has been altered into an entertainment palace. His life changes when he is chosen to be a companion for a rather objectionable boy, Jasper. Jasper freaked me out a bit with his obsession with traps and dead things. Just imagine a creepy child out on the bleak and misty moor .. get the idea?

Jasperâs mother Edie and her brother Charles are both authors .. until tragedy strikes.

Anna voices the present day story as she begins to research the past in her role as custodian of the museum. So many files, documents etc need sorting, a daunting task. But as she unearths the deaths of the two authors questions are asked and secrets revealed.

I liked the way the whole history is explored, the wonderfully descriptive writing means there is a sense of tension but also the appropriateness of the time period. This moves along at a steady pace, slightly mysterious but also a saga involving the families. The whole area is bought to life and you find yourself absorbed along with Anna trying to fix the pieces together. Some social taboos of the era add to the misunderstandings. As generations progress the truth has to be revealed.

I enjoyed this, the alternating timelines worked well, sometimes there can be such a stark difference that it makes it awkward to shift focus but The Companion reads smoothly. My favourite segments were Billyâs though, he really captivated me as a boy.

Iâm thrilled I had the opportunity to read The Companion and to be a part of the blog tour .. my thanks to the author and publisher for my copy which I read and reviewed voluntarily.