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When a final goodbye in Cornwall is only the beginning…
Meredith Tremayne Russell has spent her life mapping the world, first in intelligence during WWII, and later as a professor. But at ninety-eight with time running out, she faces a journey she cannot chart, a return to her old Cornish home to sell it and to scatter her beloved husband’s ashes.
With her is her twenty-five-year-old granddaughter, Grace, a dyslexic who believes she is a failure in a family of academics. For Grace the trip is a welcome escape from her mother’s demands. But when she unlocks her great-grandmother’s abandoned art studio, she finds a legacy of a passionate artist and a French resistance fighter.
As Meredith relives the frozen December of her 1946 wedding, she understands her final mission isn’t to say goodbye to her old home, but to draw one last map—showing Grace how to navigate a life of her own making.
Publisher: EMF Press
Format: Ebook (including Kindle Unlimited) : Paperback (22 October 2026)
Source: Ecopy received for review – 198 pages
MY THOUGHTS
Congratulations and happy publication day to Liz Fenwick.
I haven’t yet read The Secret Shore, which I believe features Meredith’s wartime story, but that didn’t matter at all. I enjoyed this as a standalone but it has made me want to read the other book even more now.
Mainly set in 2012 with flashbacks to 1946, the main characters are Dr Meredith Tremayne Russell and her granddaughter Grace. Aged 98 Meredith (Merry) is aware her remaining time is short and there are matters to be settled. One is to scatter her beloved husband Jake’s ashes and to deal with the disposal of her much loved Cornish home, Kestle. Merry and Grace travel from the US to Cornwall and this is where most of the story takes place.
Grace and her grandmother are close but academically different. Merry was a formidable career woman working as a cartographer (mapmaker) and her contribution during the war years was invaluable. Grace is 25 with her own struggles and drifting, not knowing what she wants to do with her life, she feels a failure and is under the thumb of her academic and domineering mother Marina. Merry is hoping that Grace will map out her own dreams and discover a satisfying life for herself.
Being back at Kestle soothes Merry and she is in a reflective mood as she looks back over her life and in particular her marriage to Jake. Friendship and community feature heavily – there are very few of Merry’s contemporaries remaining however she is a popular figure and people want to help as Grace works hard to prepare one last Christmas for them both.
I love Cornwall but haven’t been back for many years however the author’s beautiful and evocative descriptive prose in setting the location came through clearly. Kestle and its surrounds play their own part in the story and Grace’s discoveries of the past were so interesting.
I thoroughly enjoyed this gentle story and hoped that Grace would bloom whilst in her grandmother’s company and find her own path. Merry, for her part, was so ready to be with her Jake again, and there is a tender supernatural element to the story which pulls at the heartstrings.
This is such a heartwarming read of love and loss but also of discovering your own worth. I took each character to my heart and I would love to see Grace feature in a future story.
Novelist, slave to two cats and dreamer turned doer….
Award winning author of The Cornish House, A Cornish Affair, A Cornish Stranger, Under A Cornish Sky, The Returning Tide, One Cornish Summer, The Path to the Sea, The River Between Us, The Secret Shore, The Secrets of Harbour House and the novellas A Cornish Christmas Carol and Delivering Christmas. She lives in Cornwall with her husband and spends her time wrangling two mad cats, plot walking, reading and procrastinating on social media.
Her books are available in Dutch, Germany, Portuguese, French, Estonia, Norwegian, Danish, Turkish, Swedish, Latvian, Serbian, Czech, Hungarian, Italian and Finnish.
Author Links: Website | X | Insta | Facebook | Bluesky | AmazonUK
