One Moonlit Night
By Rachel Hore

One Moonlit Night is a rich, beautiful novel set during the war that is easy to get immersed in with its romance, secrets and war… Follow down to the blurb and my full review below.
Firstly, thanks to publisher Simon and Schuster for inviting me to review on the blog tour.

Blurb

The unmissable new novel from the million-copy Sunday Times bestselling author of A Beautiful Spy

Loyalty and betrayal, hope and despair, One Moonlit Night tells the captivating story of a husband and wife separated by secrets as well as by war.

Accept it, he is dead.
No, it’s not true.
It is. Everyone thinks so except you.

Forced to leave their family home in London after it is bombed, Maddie and her two young daughters take refuge at Knyghton, the beautiful country house in Norfolk where Maddie’s husband Philip spent the summers of his childhood.

But Philip is gone, believed to have been killed in action in northern France. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Maddie refuses to give up hope that she and Philip will some day be reunited.

Arriving at Knyghton, Maddie feels closer to her missing husband, but she soon realises that there’s a reason Philip has never spoken to her about his past. Something happened at Knyghton one summer years before. Something that involved Philip, his cousin Lyle and a mysterious young woman named Flora.

Maddie’s curiosity turns to desperation as she tries to discover the truth, but no one will speak about what happened all those years ago, and no one will reassure her that Philip will ever return to Knyghton.
The extraordinarily powerful new novel from bestselling author Rachel Hore. 

Review

Having enjoyed A Beautiful Spy, it now gives me great pleasure in telling you how good and compelling One Moonlit Night is. It is an eloquently written book, set in the second world war, that has a whirlwind romance to get caught up in before war breaks out and the lovers, now man and wife – Maddie and Phillip are then separated because he has to fight. They built up a family with two daughters, whom he has no choice but to leave behind, as they then seek refuge. It is like that ultimate emotional romance that plays out as glee that two lovers are together in such a romantic fashion, and scenic areas are painted in the minds eye throughout, which all turns to sorrow and into page-turner.

As the war rages on there is tides of emotion as Phillip may or may not be alive. Everyone except from Maddie thinks he is dead. You really feel for Maddie in this situation. It also turns out that she didn’t really know her husband as well as she perhaps thought as there are so many secrets to be uncovered about events that happened years ago that he never talked about.  The complex mystery about the man whom she married starts when a folder belonging to Phillip is handed to her and realises there are certain things that she had no idea about. It means she has to go to Knyghton, in Norfolk, a place where Phillip spent summer-times in. As well as meeting members of his family and the Land Girls, there is also a photograpgh, that poses many questions and further deepens the mystery of secrets that swirls round and compounds in the book, along with love, loyalty and betrayal. There is much intrigue to be sought and many questions to be answered right up until a well thought out ending.