The Clockmaker’s Daughter, by Kate Morton.

The Clockmaker’s Daughter, by Kate Morton.  Simon and Schuster, 2018.

Forthcoming

3 stars

A big novel full of mystery and magic centered around a house on the Thames River upstream from London and spanning from the 1860s to the present.

Kate Morton was born and raised in rural Australia, before coming to England where she studied theater and English literature.  She has published five popular novels before this one.

Her new novel tells several stories at once, all relating more or less, to an artist, his model, and his friends who had gathered at a country house for a month of creative work and play in 1862.  But the idyllic time ends in tragedy and death.  In the upcoming generations others come to the house and encounter the ghost still present in the house. Who the characters were and how they got there appears in long flashbacks.  Among the many narrators is a ghost, and  the house seems to hold magic.

The Clockmaker’s Daughter is a big book with lots of characters, complex interwoven subplots, and  long descriptive passages.  While I enjoyed parts of the book immensely, I often wished that the author had focused more sharply on fewer narratives instead of trying to write an epic.