Jonah and Verity strike up a mutually
life-saving pen-pal relationship just at the point Verity’s life
spectacularly implodes and Jonah’s is set to be rebuilt following a
lengthy prison sentence.
Desperate to escape the person he once
was, Jonah tried to disappear into a quiet, small-town life, but he
finds it as difficult to escape his past as Verity finds it to emerge
from hers. They cling to each others letters as
the only source of hope and light in the face of increasingly dark
forces.
Most of the early chapters were spent
muddling through the fog of who exactly our hero and heroine are, how
they know each other and why they’re in touch but despite this, the
decrepitly glamorous setting, enigmatic snippets of back-story and
endearingly sincere exchanges hold your attention from the start.
Crowe has turned out a story that
writers with decades of experience would proudly call their best and
My Dearest Jonah is a return to the kind of craftsmanship we’ve
given up on seeing in modern novels and you probably won’t have
seen since you last read a ‘classic’. Crowe’s tightrope balance of visual
embellishment without exhaustive description can’t be taught and
will certainly see him crowned as one of our greatest modern writers
once the national curriculum exam book selection committee get hold
of his work.
You’ll surely want to read more from
this young writer and, sadly, this is only his second novel, but his
debut, Ashes, looks equally dark & captivating.
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