Part of the Spell

Born and brought up in the Essex market town where she still lives, Stella is content with the everyday satisfactions that marriage and motherhood bring. Only when her own mother goes missing does Stella’s sense of herself, and the world she inhabits, shift . . . like her central character’s life, Rachel Heath’s novel has its own quiet pleasures.

Sunday Times

Heath’s skill is to wind people together, some of them related to one another, others strangers with nothing in common except the place in which they live . . . This is a novel about personality, and behaviour – oh, and Saffron Walden. Much is convincing (Saffron Walden entirely so: I feel I know it). The Finest Type of English Womanhood was shortlisted for the Costa first novel award. The second is notoriously hard to pull off, particularly when the first has attracted attention. Part of the Spell goes a good way towards meeting that challenge.

Penelope Lively, Guardian

This quiet, engaging novel ... casts its own enchantment on the reader, teasing you in through meanderings and byways to the crux of the matter – honest self-knowledge, engagement with the reality of our ordinary lives, facing up to ourselves with all our history, our limitations and faults, forgiveness of ourselves for not being bigger, better people ... Part of the Spell is a perceptive and warmhearted celebration of home, and of knowing and accepting who you are.

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