The Long Weekend: ‘By the time you read this, I’ll have killed one of your husbands’

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In the contemporary new release from Fiona Palmer, The Long Weekend, four strangers attend a writing workshop retreat run by a bestselling author. Those nice people at Netgalley and Basic Books sent a free e-copy of this book. Both “life” and “house” appear in the title, but it's more about “house” than “life”, including architecture, sales, renovations, remodeling, redecorating, which aristo hired and later fired which architect, and which magazine critic praised or savaged which design.

Weekend Breaks 2023 / 2024 | Thomas Cook Weekend Breaks 2023 / 2024 | Thomas Cook

Toby– an art-history professor who is married to Ruth a doctor. They have an infant and their marriage is under strain. To make matters worse, Ruth is a highly functioning alcoholic… until she isn’t. This story is told from multiple points of view. The atmosphere is tense, the characters were flawed, unlikable, they all have secrets but they're well developed. You have to give your full attention whilst reading as you don't always know whose speaking and there is no chapters. I enjoyed the mystery and intriguing plotline. The pace is steady in this well written book. I didn't see the last twist coming. The note attached to the gift, claims that one of their husbands will be murdered that night, and with 📵 no cell service, the roads impassable due to the weather, and the dementia of their host John, causing additional confusion…the women must survive the night before they learn the fate of their spouses. The killer was Mark. He planned to make it look like Edie and Paul ran away together, but he had killed Paul too. A relaxing long weekend away for three couples goes horribly wrong, becoming instead the weekend from hell.The Long Weekend bulges with stories like these: delicious, occasionally fantastical, revealing in ways that Downton Abbey never was. It is as if Tinniswood is at the biggest, wildest, most luxuriantly decadent party ever thrown, and he knows everyone. Here is the society decorator Sibyl Colefax, burning rosemary on saucers so that her Chelsea villa might smell enticing to guests she hoped to bag as clients; here is the future Edward VIII doing his needlepoint on a low modern sofa at the newly remodelled Fort Belvedere in Windsor Great Park; and here is Edwin Lutyens worrying about Castle Drogo in Devon, the modern yet timelessly solid place he is building for the tea importer Julius Drewe. Among Tinniswood’s virtues as a writer are his ability to animate buildings in a way that makes the pulse race even when the text is not accompanied by an image; his refusal to succumb to what he calls the “dangers of periodisation” (those who inhabited the world of England between the wars had not necessarily been formed by it); and, above all, his boundless taste for gossip. You may not mourn this privileged world, its nepotism or its bigotry. But you can’t fail to be entertained by it Thank you to Better Reading and the author, for an ARC of this novel by Australian author, Fiona Palmer. Adrian Tinniswood tells this story early on in The Long Weekend, his fantastically readable and endlessly fascinating book about life in the English country house between the wars, offering it as an alternative narrative both to the “sternly just and justly stern judgment on the idyllisers” provided by the posthumous publication of the poems of Wilfred Owen, and to the fragmented realities of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. In the mansions and manor houses of postwar England, it was, he writes, “Buchan’s view which triumphed, not Owen’s bitter sacrifice or Eliot’s message of despair and redemption”. The peers of the realm – there were 746 of them at the armistice – buried their sons, and carried on as before, cleaving to the past as if to a beloved body. Meanwhile, a new generation bought or (more often) rented their own grand houses, many of them facilitated in this not too long afterwards by the depression, when the market was flooded with such properties. Algarve Holidays | Antalya Holidays | Antigua Holidays | Balearic Islands Holidays | Barbados Holidays | Benidorm Holidays | Bodrum Holidays | Bulgaria Holidays | Canary Islands Holidays | Cancun Holidays | Cape Verde Holidays | Caribbean Holidays | Corfu Holidays | Costa Del Sol Holidays | Crete Holidays | CroatiaHolidays | Cruise Holidays| Cuba Holidays | Cyprus Holidays Yes, this novel raises the question of “How well do we really know anyone else?”. Just because you’ve known them for years and spent countless hours in their company, they might just be concealing their true nature…

The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House 1918-1939

Rob– married to Edie, he ‘ got the girl‘, much to the jealousy of the other three men. Rob and Evie have a teenage daughter called Imogen. Some chapters focus far too much on house renovations and fashions of decoration; others record in dry detail exactly how many game birds were shot at various shooting parties (far, far too many).All four are hoping to learn and grow from the weekend retreat but the emotional baggage that has come along for the ride is more than anyone bargained for. The premise sounded appealing - not completely original - but the kind of basis that has formed a solid foundation for many enjoyable mysteries I have read over the years. However, unfortunately, I found this latest offering from Gilly Macmillan heavy going. I didn't really mind that the setting with the isolated location and the group of women with troubled, secretive histories has all been done before - but I have seen it handled so much better. This is clumsy, more than a touch melodramatic, unbelievable and silly. This is the second book by Tinniswood I've read recently that I did not care for, and I fear we shall have to part ways in our writer-reader relationship. On one hand, it's a shame because he chooses topics that have the potential to be fascinating to me. On the other, it's deserved because he can never seem to follow through on his initial ideas. This is probably a LOT more enjoyable in a physical format. I was again faced with an audio narrator trying to narrate multiple characters with little differentiation between voices, including male and female characters. From the outset, this annual long weekend planned as an idyllic break for three couples got off to a bad start. For various reasons the three men, Paul, Toby and Mark, were unable to get away until the following day so their wives went ahead to spend the night alone in the off-grid, refurbished barn they had booked on a remote farm in Northumbria.

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This story follows four strangers who spend the weekend together at a writers retreat with a best selling author. These four people are completely different and each carry their own secrets.A group of friends - mostly lesbians, and there are some f/f sexy times in the book, though it is not a romance - gather in Devon for a celebration of the 20th anniversary of their graduation from college. There are lots of dramas going on in all their lives, and the weekend will serve to resolve some of those and also create others. Jamaica Holidays | Jersey Holidays | Kefalonia Holidays | Kos Holidays | Lake Garda Holidays | Lanzarote Holidays | Las Vegas Holidays | Madeira Holidays | Magaluf Holidays | Majorca Holidays | Maldives Holidays | Malta Holidays | Mauritius Holidays | Menorca Holidays | Mexico Holidays | Morocco Holidays | Mykonos Holidays Starts and ends with a bang, but the middle drags, The Long Weekend was entertaining/engaging during the read, but ultimately it was a pretty shallow story of deceits and secrets within a close friend group. Tagged detective, female detective, missing person, thriller, William Morrow Gillian McAllister | Just Another Missing Person I must say I’m pretty envious of the crew featured in The Long Weekend, the latest contemporary drama from West Aussie farmer, mother and author extraordinaire Fiona Palmer. I think I’d love to take part in a three-day writer’s workshop in the beautiful south west region of my home state of WA. It certainly sounds like an appealing and productive way to spend a long weekend! Whilst I dream of this kind of opportunity coming my way, I will express my thoughts around The Long Weekend, the new contemporary release from bestselling author Fiona Palmer.

The Long Weekend: ‘By the time you read this, I’ll have

This overall was a nice book. Clare Lydon is one of my favorite lesfic authors. However there are some things in this story that I could've done without. A largely character driven story, The Long Weekend explores several themes including trauma, loss, forgiveness, redemption, and self discovery. Prompted by a writing exercise, the five protagonists confront and let go of the secrets, mistakes and insecurities that haunt them. There is a lot of emotion in their individual stories, touching on a range of contemporary social issues, which Palmer handles sensitively. This book will probably be more enjoyable in its paper book format, because the pictures of home interiors will almost undoubtedly clearer and easier to examine at close range in a paper book. The fault here is the Kindle's, not the author's or publisher's.I do enjoy Fiona Palmer's works. This one is quite sweet with the underlying messages of acceptance and forgiveness. I quite liked the setting of a writer's retreat with this one- I can see how easily it could inspire people struggling with their own creativity! This would have been eliminated in the physical format, and the many twists and turns that Gilly Macmillan concocted would have been more enjoyable. It started with a wee bit of promise. The women were actually heading out on their weekend retreat, but nothing else connected with me. Literally zero things. The women arrive for a girls’ night ahead of their husbands. There’s ex-Army Jayne, hardened and serious, but also damaged. Ruth, the driven doctor and new mother who is battling demons of her own. Young Emily, just wed and insecure, the newest addition of this tight-knit band. Missing this year is Edie, who was the glue holding them together, until her husband died suddenly. She grew up in Swindon, Wiltshire and also lived in Northern California. She studied History of Art at Bristol University and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.