The Golden Hour

Kate Lord Brown

‘Don’t cry for the past,
be grateful for the memory.’ 

IF ever a story spoke loudly and exquisitely about the power of love and friendship to overcome life’s trials and tribulations, it’s this beautiful novel from the talented Kate Lord Brown.

A finalist in ITV’s The People’s Author, Brown’s (pictured below) luscious debut, The Perfume Garden, was shortlisted for The Romantic Novel of the Year in 2014 and swept readers into an epic time-slip tale centred on the brutal Spanish Civil War.

Harnessing the same dual timeline format, The Golden Hour takes us on a sensual and emotion-packed journey from Cairo on the cusp of the Second World War in 1939 to Beirut in the unsettled Seventies as Lebanon teetered on the precipice of a devastating conflict. And at the heart of the story is the unforgettable bond of friendship between two women – part of a lost generation – whose lives and loves are transformed by war and the pain and sacrifices it brings. Interweaving ruthless, glory-seeking desert archaeologists, priceless treasures, the tireless hunt for Queen Nefertiti’s tomb and the decadent cabarets of wartime Cairo with the restless lives of expats in bohemian Beirut, Brown’s atmospheric thriller is packed with dazzling landscapes, heart-melting romance and extraordinary characters who remain with you long after the last page has turned. 

In the spring of 1975, Egyptologist Dr Lucie Fitzgerald has been working for the season in Luxor but has heard that her mother Polly is dying at her home, Bellevue, in the ‘Paris of the East,’ Beirut, a city which is beset by tensions and teetering on the brink of civil war.

What London-based Lucie – a woman who feels she belongs ‘everywhere and nowhere’ – doesn’t yet know is that Polly has been lying to her for many years and has one last story to tell from her deathbed... the story of her best friend from childhood, Juno, and their life in Cairo in the 1930s.

Thirty-six years earlier, in 1939, newlyweds Polly and her husband Fitz, who works in military intelligence, arrive in Cairo where they are met by Juno and her airmail pilot husband Alec Munro, a self-centred, controlling and moody man who resents Juno’s archaeological work and her search for the greatest undiscovered tomb of all... Nefertiti's.

What Alec doesn’t know is that Juno, who is an expert in hieroglyphics, has applied to join a Swiss team heading to the Valley of the Kings to hunt for the elusive tomb and as Alec is away when she learns she has been given the job, Polly – along with Juno’s servant Raif – step in to look after Alec and Juno’s young son Billy. Juno’s decision to leave for the desert sets in motion a train of events that will echo down the years... until Polly decides that, with her death imminent, she must return to the past and reveal decades-old secrets to Lucie.

But ‘memory is a slippery creature – the past shifts and rearranges like the glass beads of a kaleidoscope’ and going back in time means revisiting all the painful ‘what ifs,’ ‘maybes’ and ‘almosts’ that are lying in wait... 

Brown imbues her gloriously romantic odyssey with the exotic allure of decadent pre-war Cairo in the days when it was ‘plentiful and bright’ and expats were seduced by skies of rose pink, hills of ‘storybook lavender,’ and the celestial blue of the palm-fringed Nile... and then perfectly juxtaposes it with the growing tensions of Beirut in 1975. Slipping seamlessly between wars and time zones, and across generations, cities and deserts, Brown’s lyrical and evocative scene-setting and narrative transports us into the world of ‘blood sisters’ Polly and Juno, and a friendship that must hold firm through love, loss, hidden truths, and terrible sadness.

Down-to-earth Lucie – who yearns to ‘belong’ – becomes the lynchpin for the captivating back stories of her quietly strong and resilient mother Polly and the determined, go-getting Juno whose life is driven by her ambition to discover the tomb of lost queen Nefertiti, and who leaves behind a trail of mystery and secrets. Gifting readers breathtaking descriptions of Cairo in its gaudy pre-war splendour, fascinating insights into the heat, dust and excitement of an archaeological dig in the Valley of the Kings, and the beauty and turmoil of war-torn Lebanon, Brown works a special kind of storytelling magic on this historical showstopper. It’s a heady experience not to be missed!
(Simon & Schuster, hardback, £18.99)