Today I’m pleased to be taking part in the blog tour for Mine. My review is written with thanks to Tracy Fenton for inviting me on the tour and to the publisher for my copy of the book via Netgalley.

Blurb:

‘

Who am I? Why am I here? Why did my mother give me away?’

On the surface, Luke and his girlfriend Hannah seem to have a perfect life. He’s an A&R man, she’s an arts correspondent and they are devoted to their new-born son Samuel.

But beneath the gloss Luke has always felt like an outsider. So when he finds his birth mother Alice, the instant connection with her is a little like falling in love.

When Hannah goes back to work, Luke asks Alice to look after their son. But Alice – fuelled with grief from when her baby was taken from her 27 years ago – starts to fall in love with Samuel. And Luke won’t settle for his mother pushing him aside once again…

Review:

I’ve heard lots of good things about Mine and was looking forward to reading it myself. It is, in many ways, the perfectly formed psychological thriller. The things that go wrong don’t happen straight away but an atmosphere of unease is there from the beginning: I knew something wasn’t right but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I had to keep reading to find out more and I loved the way the tension built gradually to a frantic ending.

The chapters in Mine alternate between Alice in the 1970s and Luke in the present day. This helped me to see the parallels between their lives and built tension further as we learnt what really happened to Alice and her friends around the time of Luke’s birth.

In Mine, Empson explores several issues. I particularly liked the way she wrote about the emotional impact of adoption on the birth mother, adoptive mother and adopted child as I haven’t read about this subject before and it gave me a lot to think about. Empson also writes about mental health very well and weaves the issues into a very compelling story.

Mine is available from Amazon .

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