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    Like Bees to Honey
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    Like Bees to Honey
    Unavailable
    Like Bees to Honey
    Ebook313 pages2 hours

    Like Bees to Honey

    By Caroline Smailes

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In her third novel, acclaimed author of ‘In Search of Adam’ and ‘Black Boxes’ Caroline Smailes draws upon her own family history for a remarkable and unforgettable story of loss and redemption.

    Nina travels to Malta with her five-year-old son Christopher. She left the island at the age of nineteen to study at Liverpool University but fell pregnant and was disowned by her family. Following a car accident her relationship with her husband breaks down and she feels compelled to return home, taking her young son with her in the hope of reconciliation with her father and siblings.

    Once in Malta, strange things start to happen. Nina discovers that the island is full of souls in various stages of transition. Malta is the place where the dead all travel to before they pass over and she is visited by seven of them who, in turn, try to help her deal with the issues that have brought her to the island after so many years away.

    As Nina travels round Malta and learns more from each friendly spirit she begins to understand why she has really come back and is forced to face some startling truths which will haunt the reader long after they put the book down.

    Caroline Smailes built up a significant cult following with her first two books, with Like Bees to Honey she has written a remarkable story which will break her through to the mainstream audience she so richly deserves.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJun 24, 2010
    ISBN9780007357130
    Unavailable
    Like Bees to Honey
    Author

    Caroline Smailes

    CAROLINE SMAILES lives in the North West of England with her husband and three children. The Drowning of Arthur Braxton is her fifth novel. She can be found at www.carolinesmailes.co.uk and twitter.com/Caroline_S

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    Reviews for Like Bees to Honey

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    • 4/5
      Set primarily in Malta, this novel makes full use of the sights, sounds, history and culture of that island to tell its story. I visited Malta about twenty years ago and it brought back a lot of happy memories. The author makes the case for Malta being a sort of congregation point for the recently dead, and the images of the spirit world that she creates are compelling.There is a lot of sadness in the story – a cloud of tears was gathering on the horizon from an early stage – but it has its wacky side too, a world in which it’s possible to discuss 'Come Dine with Me' over a beer with Jesus (yes, that Jesus). Also fascinating was the séance, seen through the eyes of a spirit.Language is important, and Maltese language interspersed with the text is translated immediately below, which I thought worked quite well, and if it was repetitive there was a deliberation about the repetition that was pleasantly quirky rather than annoying. Likewise, characters’ voices are clearly delineated with the main character Nina’s voice plodding and robotic, contrasting with that of bolshie ghost Tillie whose sections were full of humour. There is a lot of messing about with fonts and page layouts, and judging from the excerpts from the author’s other work at the end, this is a feature of all her writing. The only element of it I found irritating was the rendering of sounds, so that if a tap was dripping, it would appear as...The tap dripped~ dr-ip~dr-ip~dr-ip.There must have been some purpose to it, but it made me feel as though I was at a parent and toddler group at story time, and the story reader was not going to carry on until every child in the circle had pretended to be a tap dripping. Oh well. I’m not greatly into gimmicky writing but given that I really enjoyed this book I’d love to think there was more to it than gimmickry.