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The Distant Hours
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The Distant Hours (2010) (edit title/settings)

by Kate Morton (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

Another unforgettable tale weaving history and mystery from the bestselling author of The House At Riverton and The Forgotten Garden .

Edie Burchill and her mother have never been close, but when a long lost letter arrives one Sunday afternoon with the return address of Millderhurst... read more

Summary edit see section history

Edie Burchill and her mother have never been close, but when a long lost letter arrives one Sunday afternoon with the return address of Millderhurst Castle, Kent, printed on its envelope, Edie begins to suspect that her mother’s emotional distance masks an old secret.

Evacuated from... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

Edie Burchill and her mother have never been close, but when a long lost letter arrives one Sunday afternoon with the return address of Millderhurst Castle, Kent, printed on its envelope, Edie begins to suspect that her mother’s emotional distance masks an old secret.

Evacuated from London as a thirteen year old girl, Edie’s mother is chosen by the mysterious Juniper Blythe, and taken to live at Millderhurst Castle with the Blythe family: Juniper, her twin sisters and their father, Raymond. In the grand and glorious Millderhurst Castle, a new world opens up for Edie’s mother. She discovers the joys of books and fantasy and writing, but also, ultimately, the dangers.

Fifty years later, as Edie chases the answers to her mother’s riddle, she, too, is drawn to Millderhurst Castle and the eccentric Sisters Blythe. Old ladies now, the three still live together, the twins nursing Juniper, whose abandonment by her fiancé in 1941 plunged her into madness.

Inside the decaying castle, Edie begins to unravel her mother’s past. But there are other secrets hidden in the stones of Millderhurst Castle, and Edie is about to learn more than she expected. The truth of what happened in the distant hours has been waiting a long time for someone to find it...

Characters edit see section history

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.”
  • “I woke with a start, catching my dream in the process of dissolving. Tattered fancies hung like ghosts in the room’s corners and I lay very still for a time, willing them not to dissipate”
  • “After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.”
    Edie
  • “Something I'd seen or heard and since forgotten, fluttering now within the shadowy recesses of my mind, refusing to stop still and let me name it.”
    Edie
  • “I'm good with words, but not the spoken kind: I've often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper. And I suppose, in a sense, that's what I do, for I've hundreds of the other sort, the friends contained within bindings, page after glorious page of ink, stories that unfold the same way every time but never lose their joy, that take me by the hand and lead me through doorways into worlds of great terror and rapturous delight. Exciting, worthy, reliable companions - full of wise counsel, some of them - but sadly ill equipped to offer the use of a spare bedroom for a month or two.”
    Edie
  • “Details murmured into place around me and it seemed as if I'd stepped into the fabric of a dream; as if I were occupying, once again, the very same temporal and geographic space that my long-ago self had done.”
    Edie
  • “It's natural in times of great perplexity, I think, to seek out the familiar, and the high shelves and long rows of neatly line-up spines were immensely reassuring.”
    Edie
  • “Every elderly woman I've known has told me, at some point, and with varying degrees of wistfulness, that she's eighteen years old on the inside. But it isn't true. I'm only thirty and I know that. The stretch of years leaves none unmarked; the blissful sense of youthful invincibility peels away and responsibility brings its weight to bear.”
    Edie
  • “Onions were important, of course, but that did nothing to alter the fact that their leaves brought absolutely nothing to a flower arrangement.”
    Seraphina Blythe (aka Saffy)
  • “He crossed his arms like a cranky child and I scrabbled for the words to explain to him the contract between reader and writer, the dangers of narrative greed. The sacrilege of just blurting out what had taken chapters to build, secrets hidden carefully by the author behind countless sleights of hand.”
  • “Her family, her home, was built on a foundation of words, he'd said, time and again, the family tree laced together with sentences in place of limbs.”
    Persephone Blythe (aka Percy)
  • “It wasn't money or status he admired, but brains; talent was the currency with which he sought to surround himself.”
    Percy's thoughts of her father
  • “The Blythes were no more and their distant hours were silent.”
  • “It's a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.”
    Edie
  • “Lack of potatoes left a person's stomach growling, but absence of beauty hardened the soul.”
    Seraphina Blythe (aka Saffy)
  • “Rita's as old-school as the Motown records she collects and her salon does a roaring trade specializing in finger waves, beehives, and blue rinses for the bingo set. She's been around long enough to be retro without realizing it...”
    Edith Burchill (aka Edie)
  • “...Mum was standing tentatively just inside, bag and hat in hand. A spirit of defensive caution had taken hold of her features as she surveyed the unfamiliar, decidedly modern cafe, and I glanced away, at my hands, the table, fiddled with the zip on my bag, anything to avoid bearing witness. I've noticed that look of uncertainty more often lately, and I'm not sure whether it's because she's getting older, or because I am, or because the world really is speeding up. My reaction to it dismays me, for surely a glimpse of my mother's weakness should engender pity, make her more lovable to me, but the opposite is true. It frightens me, like a tear in the fabric of normality that threatens to render everything unlovely, unrecognizable, not as it should be. All my life my mother has been an oracle, a brick wall of propriety, so to see her unsure, particularly in a situation that I meet without a wrinkle, tilts my world and makes the solid ground swirl like clouds beneath me.”
    Edith Burchill (aka Edie)
  • “I remember lying on the small spare mattress at Rita's house as my four cousins filled the room with their soft snores and fidgety sleep noises, wishing she were my mother instead, that I lived in a warm, cluttered house stretching at the seams with siblings and old stories. I remember, too, the instant rush of liquid guilt as the thought formed in my mind, screwing my eyes tight shut and picturing my disloyal wish as a piece of knotted silk, untying it in my mind, then conjuring a wind to blow it away as if it had never been. But it had.”
    Edith Burchill (aka Edie)
  • “As I sat silently beside my mum, worrying about my dad, making a note to buy an umbrella, listening to the wall clock sweep away the seconds, a horde of lurking thoughts seeped along the wall to brush my shoulders with their tapered fingers. Before I knew what was happening, they'd taken my hand and led me places I hadn't been for years.”
    Edith Burchill (aka Edie)
  • “For the photographer has captured more than two young people on their wedding day, he's captured a threshold being crossed, an ocean wave at the precise moment before it turns to foam and begins to crash towards the ground.”
    Edith Burchill (aka Edie)
  • “Saffy remembered her own childish eagerness to grow up, how she'd waited impatiently on the cliff edge, pleading with adulthood to claim her, and she wondered whether it was possible ever to slow another's journey. Was it even fair to try? Surely there could be nothing wrong in wanting to save Meredith, just as she'd tried to save Juniper, from reaching adulthood and its disappointments too fast?”
    Seraphina Blythe (aka Saffy)
Show all 21 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

It started with a letter. A letter that had been lost a long time, waiting out half a century in a forgotten postal bag in the dim attic of a nondescript house in Bermondsey.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Prologue
Part One:
A Lost Letter Finds Its Way
A Memory Clarifies
The Books and the Birds
Raymond Blythe's Milderhurst
Chapter One:
Man of Kent
Journey Through a Garden's Bones
Three Fading Sisters
Caretakers in the Veins
The Empty Attic and the Distant Hours
The Mud Man, the Muniment Room, and a Locked Door
Say You'll Come Dancing
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Part Two:
The Book of Magical Wet Animals
A Suitable Strip Club and Pandora's Box
The Weight of the Waiting Room
Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig
One
Two
Three
Four
Part Three:
Kidnappings and Recriminations
The Plot Becomes Rather Thick
One
Two
The Letting Pages
An Invitation and a New Edition
Three
Four
Five
Part Four:
Back to Milderhurst Castle
A Faux Pas and a Coup
One
Two
Three
Four
Mrs. Bird's Suspicions
The Night He Didn't Come
The Muniment Room and a Discovery
A Long Way to Fall
Percy Blythe's Story
A Night at the Castle
The Day After
And in the End
Part Five:
One
Two
Three
Four
Epilogue
Acknowledgments

Glossary edit see section history

  • oast: a kiln used for drying hops
  • oast house: a building containing an oast, typically built of brick in a conical shape with a cowl on top.
  • weald: a formerly wooded district of southeastern England that included parts of Kent, Surrey, and East Sussex.
  • titular: denoting a person or thing from whom or which the name of an artistic work or similar is taken
  • niggling: cause slight but persistent annoyance, discomfort, or anxiety
  • plinth: a heavy base supporting a statue or vase
  • pleached: entwine or interlace (tree branches) to form a hedge or provide cover for an outdoor walkway: an avenue of pleached limes
  • intrepid: fearless; adventurous (often used for rhetorical or humorous effect)
  • lurcher: a crossbred dog, typically a retriever, collie, or sheepdog crossed with a greyhound, of a kind originally used for hunting and by poachers for catching rabbits.
  • innocuous: not harmful or offensive
  • skirting boards: a baseboard
  • Aga: a type of heavy heat-retaining stove or range used for cooking and heating
  • fenders: used several different ways in the book. Finally figured out it must be wings!Used in reference to a butterfly and in describing architecture
  • muniment room: a documents or record, esp. one kept in an archive.
  • muniments: title deeds or other documents proving a person's title to land.
  • chimera: (in Greek mythology) a fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.
  • Boches: dated, offensive a German, esp. a soldier
  • salubrious: health-giving; healthy (speaking of recipes)
  • piccalilli: a relish of chopped vegetables, mustard, and hot spices.ORIGIN mid 18th cent.: probably from a blend of pickle and chili
  • marrows: white-fleshed green-skinned gourd, which is eaten as a vegetable.
  • stirrup pump: a portable hand-operated water pump with a footrest resembling a stirrup, used to extinguish small fires.
  • affable: friendly, good-natured, or easy to talk to
  • eschewal: deliberately avoid using; abstain from
  • obfuscating: dark thoughts? ORIGIN late Middle English: from late Latin obfuscat- ‘darkened,’ from the verb obfuscare, based on Latin fuscus ‘dark.’
  • surreptitious: kept secret, esp. because it would not be approved of
  • lucent: glowing with or giving off light
  • digestive bisquit: Brit.a round, semisweet cookie made of wholewheat flour
  • sycophancy: a person who acts overly obedient, attentive or excessively servile toward someone important in order to gain advantage
  • rejoinders: replies, especially sharp or witty
  • fey: having supernatural powers of clairvoyance
  • prevaricated: speak or act in an evasive way
  • mollified: appease the anger or anxiety of (someone)
  • imperious: assuming power or authority without justification; arrogant and domineering: his imperious demands.
  • serpentine: complex, cunning, or treacherous
  • coterie: a small group of people with shared interests or tastes, esp. one that is exclusive of other people
Show all 35 glossary entries

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 1 of 5 in Gothic-Lite. (community list)
This book is in Rainy Day Books (Staff Picks for 2010). (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Kate Morton (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: ALLEN & UNWIN
Country: AUS
Publication Date: 2010-11-01
ISBN: 9781742371832
Page Count: 576

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: PR9619.4.M74D57 2010
  • Dewey: 813

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

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