Amazon Review
Maria McCann enters the fray of 1640s England and Civil War with considerable gusto in this ambitious first novel. A coldly gruesome murder committed by her youthful narrator opens his account, and the bloody siege of his lover's Diggers colony ends it. Narrator Jacob Cullen, educated but now a servant, flees his royalist household, taking his bride of just an hour and his brother. In a second act of terrible brutality, he beats and rapes his wife. Becoming a pikeman in Cromwell's New Model Army, he befriends Christopher Ferris, an idealist disaffected by the Army and in search of a less tainted freedom. And so the two desert and head for London and the pleasures of Cheapside--and each other. Jacob becomes "a fornicator of unnatural appetite, in thrall to an Atheist... I was in love". But Ferris is intent on establishing a commune, a prospect Jacob reviles, yet to keep his lover he has no choice but to join the motley band.
McCann's writing is rich in detail and colour--the muck and mud of battlefields, London's crowded stench, and the colonists' back-breaking work on the land; she manoeuvres her large cast of characters adeptly, and her dialogue is nicely pithy. The flaw that blights the plot is a yawning gap of credibility: Jacob's acts of violence--the murder, the rape and much more--which occur almost out of the blue simply don't fit his persona. His motives are too thin; nor is he presented as an unbridled brute masquerading as sanity itself. So how are we to "read" him? Even Ferris's accusation--"A man's own evil is his devil and yours, Jacob, is mastery"--suggests too little and comes too late. Jacob's pivotal place in the narrative is discredited by the lack of psychic underpinning and this mars an otherwise robust debut. --Ruth Petrie

This book is to be left in the waiting room at the Clinical Psychology Service bungalow on the Colchester General Hospital site.

If you are the finder, you can make a journal entry here - you can remain anonymous if you want! I hope you enjoy the book and that you'll get a chance to leave it somewhere else for someone else to find in due course. There is an old (but still very informative) article on bookcrossing to be found here:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jul/31/fiction.features1



If you like the idea of bookcrossing, more free books can be found in Colchester bookcrossing zones:

Colchester:
Slack Space, Eld Lane
Love Coffee Aroma, High Street
Purple Dog, Eld Lane
Foresters Arms, Castle Road
Hospital Arms, Crouch Street
Fox Pub, Layer de la Haye

Please do stop for a coffee or drink while you're there.

This book actually found its way to The Greyhound Pub, Ipswich, where I picked it up at a bookcrossing meet. Great to see so many friendly faces.

Having a sort out and moving on some books I haven't had time to read.

At the Chelmsford bookcrossing meet.

Taken from Chelmsford meeting to either wild release or pass onto my mother

On one of the benches at about 10.30 am