Beautiful, beguiling and treacherous… Big Little Lies meets Picnic at Hanging Rock in a secluded valley over the Blue Mountains.
Four women and their children are invited to the beautiful but remote Capertee Valley, west of the Blue Mountains.
Once home to a burgeoning mining industry, now all that remains are ruins slowly being swallowed by the bush and the jewel of the valley, a stunning, renovated Art Deco hotel. This is a place haunted by secrets. In 1948 Clara Black walked into the night, never to be seen again.
As the valley beguiles these four friends, and haunts them in equal measure, each has to confront secrets of her own: Nathalie, with a damaged marriage; Emmie, yearning for another child; Pen, struggling as a single parent; and Alexandra, hiding in the shadow of her famous husband.
But as the mystery of what happened seventy years earlier unravels, one of the women also vanishes into this bewitching but wild place, forcing devastating truths to the surface.
Vanessa McCausland’s debut novel was 2019’s fast-paced mystery The Lost Summers of Driftwood. I enjoyed that and, at the time, said I looked forward to what she delivered next. Well, this is it – and wow! No second novel struggles here… The Valley of Lost Stories is a superbly atmospheric, absolutely gripping read, and I LOVED it. I actually carried it around with me to a number of appointments, devouring each page in waiting rooms, unable to put this down. I haven’t done that with a book for a while.
The mothers all bond at the beginning of the book, and any mother of school aged kids can relate to the fragile threads that bind those early days of school yard friendships. Chapter by chapter, through different perspectives, we get to know these women better – as they get to know each other better, and the story unfolds.
This is an exquisitely layered story, with themes around female friendship, motherhood and marriage, domestic violence, and more. Social media etiquette, a mysterious photo… a child who is acting strangely… it’s difficult to truly explain this story without giving things away. Vanessa masterfully builds the tension, evocatively using the setting of the valley to give the read a languid feel, weaving in a mystery from decades earlier.
Despite enjoying Vanessa’s first novel, this was an unexpected read. I was completely swept up in it, and it has haunted me in the days since finishing it. It has Netflix series written all over it. But until someone is smart enough to make this for the screen, I’ve put The Valley of Lost Stories on my very small ‘to read again’ pile. It’s seriously that good.
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