Customer Reviews

Time Out of Mind

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Don't remember how I came across this book, but I'm so glad I did. I'm not surprised to read that Shirley Wright is a poet as this novel is beautifully written. Read it in just two sittings which is quite something for me, these days. The story was gripping and the description of Cornwall and the heroine's state of mind was vividly depicted and made me just want to read on-and on until I reached the end. I couldn't fault it if I tried really hard. Excellent.

Time Out of Mind evokes the myths and romance of the Cornish landscape while telling a very modern tale of relationships gone sour and the struggle to adjust to a new life in an isolated corner of the country. The author's effortless, poetic style makes the story slip past like silk. A lovely read!

Here is a book that encompasses the mystical, magical qualities of Cornwall while telling a story woven as one with the landscape. The author has created distinct, well-developed characters, and although there is a large amount of internalization from the 1st person main character, this is skillfully handled by the author. Highly recommended.

I loved "Time out of Mind". Recommended to me whilst visiting England, I found it a wonderful read full of beautiful descriptions of the Cornish coast. I could smell and hear the pounding sea. Also all the characters had a mysterious side to them which invited me to read on. I wanted more and didn't want to finish the book. A sure sign of a great author.

What a great book! The writing is beautifully crafted, the descriptions of Cornwall are wonderfully evocative, and the plot is completely enthralling. Plus there's even a cat - what more could you want really? I would definitely recommend this to anyone.

Is Penmaris haunted by a previous owner or is it Rose's mind playing tricks on her? This is the question that persists throughout this haunting and lyrical novel about a woman's attempt to come to terms with grief and guilt. After suffering a miscarriage and then stumbling on her husband's infidelity, Rose has run off to a cottage in Cornwall in search of some kind of peace. Straight away she loves its tranquillity and questions her previous yuppie lifestyle, but there are odd things happening; unexplained noises in the night, a freak storm from which she emerges bone dry. She links these events to the disappearance of Sally Hendry, a poet and previous inhabitant of Penmaris, whose body was washed up on the beach some years earlier. Untangling Sally's relationship with other village inhabitants and discovering how (or if?) she really died, becomes Rose's way of laying her own ghosts to rest.
Shirley Wright is a poet with a real gift for choosing words, which makes this book a pleasure to read and the local characters -dissolute local artist made good, dour gardener with a passionate past - are fully rounded. But what really impresses me is how the author deals with Rose's brush with the supernatural, offering up at least partial explanations for the weird goings-on without ever disproving them completely, leaving us - and Rose - to make of them what we will. Billed as a `summer read', this book is solid contemporary fiction for any time of year.

Vivid, intriguing, evocative. Full of the colours, sounds, smells and energy of the cornish sea and landscape, past and present; but above all, you perceive Penmaris through the senses of a woman on the edge, in real time. But what is actually real? Is she just crazy or has distress opened her up to another reality? I couldn't put it down! Cornwall will never be quite the same again! I loved it. Made me stop and think about what matters to me too.

I couldn't put my Kindle down and when I was forced to (stupid work!) I found myself yearning to go back to the Penmaris of Shirley Wright's Time Out Of Mind.

With a wonderfully descriptive backdrop of the Cornish Coast, underlined with beautiful emotive poetry, Time Out of Mind expertly explores a number of contemporary themes.

I would recommend this book to anyone and I look forward to the next publication from Shirley Wright!!

A gripping read. I did enjoy the evocation of Cornwall and the mysterious atmosphere of its landscape. And I particularly liked the way Rose arrives full of her own problems, gets drawn into something, she knows not what, and proceeds to make all kinds of assumptions about the past which turn out to be quite wrong . So she is constantly reassessing what she knows and eventually, through discovering what did actually happen, she is able to come to good enough terms with her own problems to allow her to make the decisions and changes she has to make. The parallels between past and present are cleverly done and make you think about both, seeing an incident from a different angle when you link it with something similar from present or past - as indeed happens in life!

A beautifully crafted, poetic contemporary novel, Time out of Mind combines a ghostly mystery with the soul-searching of a woman, Rose Little, who, following the miscarriage of a much-wanted baby, then stumbles across her husband's infidelity and escapes to Cornwall to paint and clear her head. While there, the cottage she has fled to beings to haunt her, as she thinks she hears, and even finds herself painting what she imagines to be (or perhaps really is) a previous inhabitant, the racy Sally Hendry whose body was washed up - or so we assume - on the shore under mysterious circumstances many years before. As her quest to re-discover herself is reflected in her pursuit of the truth around what happened to Sally Hendry, the landscape and people of Cornwall are brought to life in lyrical, but not stereotypical, fashion. For me, the main plot, and indeed the back-story behind Rose's fascination with Sally Hendry, built up a little slowly in the first half, but in the second half I really couldn't put it down. The cathartic ending was especially beautifully constructed, leaving the reader with a sense of Schadenfreude and a glimmer of hope for the future, in equal measure.