The Bride Stone

LoveReading Says

Set in Britain in 1796, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, Sally Gardner’s The Bride Stone simply gleams with the writer’s trademark storytelling mastery. As always, Gardner’s writing dances, light of foot, vivid and energetic as a swirling tarantella, as it tells the brilliantly beguiling story of an aristocratic bachelor whose estate is on the line, and the captivating woman he bought in order to try to save it.

Recently released from incarceration in France, Duval arrives home to England to learn that his father has died, and he has little over two days to marry. Failure to succeed in this seemingly impossible task will see his father’s estate pass into the hands of his loathsome cousin.

After hearing this news, Duval happens upon a wife sale, which is explained to him thusly: “A wife is a chattel; put a scarf around her or a rope, and you can take her to market just as you would a sheep or a cow”. Desperate, Duval finds himself buying and marrying the decidedly enigmatic Edmée.

Entirely unexpectedly, Duval is first intrigued and then utterly enchanted by Edmée: “Perhaps the time had come to find out who this unknown wife of his was. He had looked at death; now he would start to examine living, and he wondered if that might not be harder”. Digging into his wife’s life unearths the “journal of a journey that no woman should ever have been subjected to”, which is only the beginning of Duval’s thrillingly winding quest to discover the secrets and truths of a woman who “dominated his thoughts”.

Sizzling with secrets, and alive with love, The Bride Stone is an absolute gem of a novel — an exquisitely-stitched treasure that’s all but impossible to put down.

Joanne Owen

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