Mysterious, exciting, immensely rewarding, it is one of those memorable books that has to be among your of all-time favourites. I fell in love with this book when it was first published in 1997. It did moderately well but not as well as it should. I think one of the problems was that up until then James Long had written adventure spy stories, he was formerly BBC correspondent and certainly knew his stuff – but then he produced this enthralling, tangled love story. As so often happens when author’s change direction, his publishers (Penguin) were not keen, so he went to HarperCollins and, if it were today, it would have been published under a pseudonym, as his other historical novels are (Will Davenport) – but that did not happen and the book rather fell between two stools. But for those who read it, Ferney held a special magic, it haunts your memory and even fifteen years later still pulls at the heart strings. Now James has written the sequel, The Lives She Left Behind, and to refresh fans memories and entice new ones, Ferney is republished. It is such a wonderful, uplifting and unusual story of a couple settling in Somerset. As they renovate their house they discover its history, meet a previous inhabitant and unlock its secrets. ~ Sarah Broadhurst
A fabulous pastoral-romantic-suspense novel that HarperCollins are getting behind in a big way.A couple are seeking to move from the city to the country. The wife, Gally, is an impetuous and instinctive person compared with her older historian husband, Mike. She finds a broken down old cottage in the Wiltshire village of Penselwood and falls in love with it. She is also drawn to a gnarled old local called Ferney, which rather annoys Mike, not least because every time that Mike begins to talk about the history of the area, Ferney puts him right as if he had been there himself... which, it turns out, he had. It transpires that Ferney is condemned to be reincarnated through the ages and occasionally, he is born at the right time to be in the company of the woman he loves, who is also on that same spiral through time. It's not happening often enough, though, and last time they met, they agreed that they would both contrive to die together. Gradually, it becomes clear that Gally is the woman, and Ferney must ask her to keep her promise. Gally, though, is pregnant now, and the powerful pull of her past-love for Ferney must battle against her present love for Mike, and all her maternal instincts.Through the earlier lives of Gally and Ferney, James Long explores the changing landscape and social history of England - from Saxon times to the present day - and weaves together a story of dreadful suspense and regenerative love. This is a rich and magical novel that will appeal to readers of bestsellers as diverse as Sarum, Midnight is a Lonely Place and The Magic Cottage.
