On Hampstead Heath
By Marika Cobbold

Astute, poignant and so relevant for today, this is a Must Read, especially for those of the social media generation. It is beautiful and funny and yet also holds deep society as it holds a magnifying glass up to certain things created by society and the advent of social media. There is terrific observations on life all boldly weaved into a great story. Marika Cobbold has the section of  modern life this contemporary story focuses on, down to a “T”.

Thank you to Georgina Moore for gifting me a proof copy of the book.

The book is also an entertaining read and below you can find the blurb and the rest of my review, buy links and a bit about the author.

Blurb

Thorn Marsh was raised in a house of whispers, of meaningful glances and half-finished sentences. Now she’s a journalist with a passion for truth, more devoted to her work at the London Journal than she ever was to her ex-husband.

When the newspaper is bought by media giant The Goring Group, who value sales figures over fact-checking, Thorn openly questions their methods, and promptly finds herself moved from the news desk to the midweek supplement, reporting heart-warming stories for their new segment, The Bright Side, a job to which she is spectacularly unsuited.

On a final warning and with no heart-warming news in sight, a desperate Thorn fabricates a good-news story of her own. The story, centred on an angelic apparition on Hampstead Heath, goes viral. Caught between her principles and her ambitions, Thorn goes in search of the truth behind her creation, only to find the answers locked away in the unconscious mind of a stranger.

Marika Cobbold returns with her eighth novel, On Hampstead Heath. Sharp, poignant, and infused with dark humour, On Hampstead Heath is an homage to storytelling and to truth; to the tales we tell ourselves, and the stories that save us.

Review

This is laugh out loud funny in many places, but also poignant and has a serious slant to it that ripples through as it is about what is truth and what is not. It shows the lengths Thorn goes to, to get some good news into the media. The book is beautifully written with a certain rhythm to it, especially when up on the heath itself, that reflects its own beauty in its scenic landscape. It has the backdrop of beauty of nature and its landscapes “Mother Nature” has produced with a very relevant, poignant human story in the forefront of it. It takes readers to Hampstead Heath, but it is a story that is relevant to everyone, wherever they are in the world.

It shows how a truthful photograph can be taken and how a photograpgher expects a certain story to surround it, and how a journalist, in this case, Thorn Marsh, distorts in writing and a certain headline, to make the photo something it is not. It’s good that it shows some remorse in these actions, but it also shows how things can then so easily get out of hand and go viral before other actions can be taken to take it down again. It is perhaps a lesson in a way of being careful of what you post and also how fake news isn’t just a creation as such that a certain American President came up with, but has been around for a long time (such as way back with the fairies), it just became on a greater scale then. It puts starkly how some people can be on social media, how people don’t always think before posting and all those hashtags of hatred and how sometimes it is irreverant and irrelevant, but something people latch onto; and the deepfakes that are created and the serious harm they cause.

The book isn’t about having a go at the press or anything, it more pinpoints certain elements of society and what has been created as Marika Cobbold is astute in her observations about modern society.

Between the wiley ways of the journalist to get his story and to turn it into something happier than it really, the real, human story emerges that is far from happy and is heartbreaking.

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About the Author

Marika Cobbold was born with newspaper ink flowing through her veins. She used to visit her father and grandfather at their offices at the Gothenburg-Post, the Swedish broadsheet her grandfather had rescued from oblivion decades earlier.

At home, when Marika wasn’t reading, she listened as the grown-ups around her discussed the issues of the day, and to the stories told by her mother and great aunt, who was a writer.

She left Sweden for England when she was nineteen, with vague plans of studying law, but eventually what her grandfather called ‘the family curse’ caught up with her, and some years later she wrote her first novel, Guppies For Tea. She has been writing ever since.