About the book:
Brimming with romance, adventure and vivid historical detail, Christina Courtenay’s gripping dual-time novel travels from the present day to the fires of ancient Pompeii.
The sunlight caught her gold bracelet, sending a flash that almost blinded her.
She closed her eyes, but jumped when the earth started shaking and there was an almighty boom behind her.
Present Day
Finally escaping an abusive marriage, Caterina Rossi takes her three-year-old daughter and flees to Italy. There she’s drawn to research scientist Connor, who needs her translation help for his work on volcanology. Together they visit the ruins of Pompeii and, standing where Mount Vesuvius unleashed its fire on the city centuries before, Cat begins to see startling visions. Visions that appear to come from the antique bracelet handed down through her family’s generations…
AD 79
Sold by his half-brother and enslaved as a gladiator in Roman Pompeii, Raedwald dreams only of surviving each fight, making the coin needed to return to his homeland and taking his revenge. That is, until he is hired to guard beautiful Aemilia. As their forbidden love grows, Raedwald’s dreams shift like the ever more violent tremors of the earth beneath his feet.
The present starts eerily to mirror the past as Cat must fight to protect her safety, and to forge a new path from the ashes of her old life…
My review:
I have always loved dual timeline/time slip novels, and Shadows in the Ashes really captured my imagination. As a child I was obsessed with the history surrounding Pompeii and the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, and I was fascinated by the bodies of those caught by the eruption. Having read this novel, Pompeii is firmly back on my bucket list.
In 2022 we meet Caterina, who escapes her violent husband and flees to Italy for the protection from her mother’s family with her young daughter. She supports herself by working in a hotel in Sorrento where she meets Connor. Undertaking some translation work for him, they become much closer and when they go to Pompeii together she has a series of visions of a man who looks very much like Connor but in a significantly distant time.
In AD79 Raedwaldis a gladiator and slave who is employed as a body guard who falls in love with the wife of his employer. Raedwald and Aemilia, with her young daughter resemble Cat and Connor, linked by the ancient bracelet Cat wears on her arm.
Both couples face similar issues, with Aemilia’s husband wanting to keep Aemilia and their daughter in Pompeii when he does not actually want her any more, and with Cat’s husband managing to track her and their daughter down in Italy, and has no intention of relinquishing the control he had before they ran away from him.
I found myself transported to ancient Pompeii, and modern day Pompeii and Sorrento so effortlessly by the prose. At times when I had to put the book down I was thinking about the story and the characters almost obsessively.
The stories and the romances reflected one another with such symmetry that they meshed together so perfectly. I adored both stories equally within the novel, which is the perfect example of the best kind of dual timeline novel. Shadows in the Ashes is a stunning dual timeline romance with tension making the novel both compulsive and tense reading.
Many thanks to Rachel’s Random Resources, and Christina Courtenay for my invitation to take part in the blog tour. I was provided with an electronic proof in exchange for my honest review. Please check out the other stops on the blog tour below:
Purchase links:
About the author:
Christina Courtenay writes historical romance, time slip and time travel stories, and lives in Herefordshire (near the Welsh border) in the UK. Although born in England, she has a Swedish mother and was brought up in Sweden – hence her abiding interest in the Vikings. Christina is a former chairman of the UK’s Romantic Novelists’ Association, now a Vice President, and has won several awards, including the RoNA for Best Historical Romantic Novel twice with Highland Storms (2012) and The Gilded Fan (2014) and the RNA Fantasy Romantic Novel of the year 2021 with Echoes of the Runes. SHADOWS IN THE ASHES (dual time/timeslip romance published by Headline Review 18th January 2024) is her latest novel. Christina is a keen amateur genealogist and loves history and archaeology (the armchair variety).
Social media:
http://www.christinacourtenay.com
https://www.facebook.com/christinacourtenayauthor?fref=ts
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