Gill Paul

You can't help but get goosebumps seeing that fateful location and date on Chapter 1: Paris, 31 August 1997. Even typing it now gives me chills. The events of that night are handled so sensitively by Gill Paul, paying the highest respect to Diana, Dodi and Henri Paul. This isn't a story about Diana, Princess of Wales but rather the story of another thorn in the royal family's side: Wallis Simpson.

31 August 1997 is a night that Rachel and Alex will never forget. They got engaged in Paris and show more came upon the wreckage of a car crash in the Alma Tunnel. Alex gets out of their car to see what is happening and finds Princess Diana in the wreckage. As more help arrives, Alex leaves the scene but not before he picks up a platinum heart charm with the initial 'J' and 'XVII' on it. What does this mean to Diana? It's a little piece of a puzzle that Alex is determined to solve as he decides to film a documentary into Diana's last known movements. Movements that included a visit to Villa Windsor, the home of Wallis Simpson.

Roll back to 1911 where Mary Kirk befriends Bessie Wallis Warfield at summer camp. The pair strike up a friendship that lasts decades, broken only by both women's love for the same man. Not Edward, Prince of Wales, but quiet and unassuming Ernest Simpson. As we see Wallis grow up, a pattern emerges of her always getting what or who she wants, even if that man appears unavailable like another woman's husband or a king.

With such a compelling story woven around the bare bones of historical facts, this is a story that captivated me from start to finish. Although she doesn't feature heavily in it, I felt as if the essence of Diana was sprinkled throughout the pages. The story that Gill Paul created felt so very like what I imagine Diana would have done. The link between Diana and Wallis, through Rachel, was so clever, imaginative and simply breathtaking.

I adored Another Woman's Husband and will definitely be recommending it to everyone I know. It is my first Gill Paul book and I won't hesitate to pick up more of her books. Very highly recommended.

I chose to read an ARC and this is my honest and unbiased opinion. show less

Lady Evelyn Herbert, along with her father, Lord Carnavon and Howard Carter, was one of the first people to enter the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, maybe even the very first. Something of a trailblazer, she had always longed to be a lady archaeologist and so her time in Egypt is a dream come true.

The Collector's Daughter tells a fictionalised account of Lady Evelyn's life and covers the discovery of the tomb, the loss of her beloved father, her marriage to Sir Brograve Beauchamp, and the show more years running up to the end of her life. I can never resist books like this that bring to life real people and events and Gill Paul has done a phenomenal job with this compelling read.

I found sense of place to be extremely strong, whether that be in the heat and dust of 1920s Egypt, or the rather less exotic London of the 1970s, interspersed with visits to Highclere, the family seat and now well known as the home of Downton Abbey. Evelyn is visited by an Egyptian academic, determined to track down items that appear to have been taken from the tomb when it was opened, and it is her visits that the author uses to take us back through Eve's life.

Whilst it is a story that would be much more ordinary without Evelyn's time in Egypt, it's her romance and subsequent marriage to Brograve that really made this book for me. Essentially it's a love story and I thought it beautifully imagined on these pages. These two characters were brought to life for me and left me wanting to know more about them (hello Google!). Indeed, the pages at the end, giving more detail about the author's extensive research and a few photographs were very welcome indeed. I'd deliberately refrained from looking at them whilst I was reading and as everything and everybody was described so well I didn't really need to, but it was still nice to turn the final page of this fabulous novel and see them there.

I thought The Collector's Daughter was an absolutely wonderful historical fiction read, quietly gripping, totally absorbing and completely fascinating, with a hint of mystery that added an extra dimension to the tender relationship between Evelyn and Brograve. show less

Who hasn't been intrigued by the fate of the Romanov family? Despite bodies and DNA evidence discovered outside of Ekaterinburg, there has long been speculation that one of the royal daughters, generally Anastasia, survived the execution and was rescued. Could anyone has survived the chaotic terror? In Gill Paul's most recent novel, it isn't Anastasia who survived, but Maria. The Lost Daughter is the story of her long life in hiding and the strange connection of this life to an abused wife show more in Australia.

In 1918, when the Romanovs were imprisoned in Ipatiev House, their circumstances were much reduced from what they had once enjoyed. Middle daughter Maria is bored but she is a pretty, charming, and outgoing young woman who cannot help but make friends with their guards, winning the men over with her genuine interest in them and their lives. She is sincerely unable to understand just how much danger she personally and her family collectively are in. And then the unimaginable happens. Her entire family is killed. Miraculously she survives and one of the young guards who she had previously befriended pulls her from the pile of bodies, runs into the woods, and takes her to safety. Peter is a good man and while they are on the run, he and Maria come to fall in love with each other, setting the course for the rest of their lives.

The novel jumps from the drama of the last days of tsarist Russia to 1973 in Australia where Val, a housewife who defied her father to marry young and without a school certificate, is trapped in a brutal and abusive marriage. Val has been estranged from her emotionally frigid, Russian father for seventeen years when she receives a call that he has been saying worrying things at his care home. He's been repeating "I didn't want to kill her" and Val is worried that he is referring to her Chinese mother, who disappeared when she was a young teenager. After his death, she is no closer to answers than she was before it but she becomes certain of one thing for sure: that she must take her daughter and leave her husband.

The novel moves back and forth between the seemingly unrelated stories of Maria and Val, from the terror of living through Stalin's purges and the horror of the siege of Leningrad to the struggle of a woman who doesn't even have the right to sue for divorce nor to expect child support. As Maria learns to live as one of the people, she is saved time and time again by her enduring love with Peter. She endures terrible hardship and great heartbreak but also the joy of family and the love of children. She knows who she is and the truth of her life even if that knowledge has to remain a secret. Val's life is full of secrets too. But it will take quite an effort to find out the truth of her mother's disappearance and her father's past. The way that the novel ultimately ties Maria's story with Val's is interesting and well done. The parallels between Maria and Val are subtle but there. Both are survivors willing to endure anything in the creating of a life worth living. Each has been victimized in horrible ways but finds the grace and resilience to build on the ashes of their pasts. In the early going, Maria's story is far more engaging than Val's but as the novel continues and Val starts to uncover the answers she seeks, her story takes on added interest as well. I had one small quibble with the novel in that Maria's children have the patronymic Alexandrovich/Alexandrovna when in fact it should have been Petrovich/Petrovna given their father's name is Peter and not Alexander. Other than that mistake, Paul has done an amazing amount of research and integrated the vast history of Russia and the Soviet Union into the narrative without ever making the reader feel as if they are reading a dry historical account. In fact, despite numbering almost 500 pages, I read this in one sitting, gripped by my interest in Maria and invested in finding out how Val's life connected to this Russian Grand Duchess. I predict that other historical fiction fans will thoroughly enjoy this alternate history and perhaps it will even leave them wishing that one of the daughters, and this daughter in particular, had escaped. show less

I don't often cry when I'm reading, but this novel brought me to tears by the end. Yes, I know it's fiction (I read the author's note at the end), but I loved how Jackie Collins and Jacqueline Susann rather than becoming rivals, became supportive friends. When Collins helps Susann when she's dying of cancer, I loved both of these women for a moment and wished there was more of this spirit in the world. A more moving read than I anticipated for a book about women who wrote raunchy novels!