The rest of the war, the years afterwards, I can barely remember them. It was like sleepwalking. I began to fear that everything I had experienced before the bomb was a dream. When I started to pull myself together, I couldn’t face searching for answers and then finding out the woman I loved was some figment of my imagination. So I clung to the journals I didn’t even recall writing and I hoped they were memories and not stories.’” The sirens woke Elsa but not me. I’d crawled into bed only an hour or so before, exhausted, bruised, desperate to blot out the memories of the previous day; the awful things I’d seen. She was shaking me, harder and harder, and even then sleep would not release me. Finally she shouted, ‘Will! Will! Wake up! Will, darling!’ We get alternate timelines - One of the past of Will, whose memories of WWII is somehow very different from what others around him know to be true, especially when it comes to his wife.

The Frequency of Us: A BBC2 Between the Covers book club pick The Frequency of Us: A BBC2 Between the Covers book club pick

A fascinating, beautiful, heartwarming novel. It kept me gripped from the very first chapter’— BETH O’LEARY Seventy years on, in the present day, Laura is struggling with anxiety and depression. She decides to stop taking her medication and is offered a job working in social services. She is introduced to an old man whose house hasn’t changed since the war, who insists his wife vanished decades ago. Does this old man suffer from dementia? Or is something more unusual happening? It is up to Laura to find out the truth. The Frequency of Us by Keith Stuart Review: My OpinionThe characters are realistic, flawed humans that are juggling and plodding on through life. Neither has had it easy. With Will sometimes living in the past and Laura still dealing with her past which is having a negative impact on her present. Funding Studies mentioned in this paper were supported by an NIH K23 Career Development Award (K23CA125585), the VA National Center of Patient Safety, and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (R18HS017820 and R18HS17244-02). HS and ANDM were supported in part by the Houston VA Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety (CIN 13-413). I love dual timeline stories and this is one of the best I’ve read. It’s told through Will’s journals from the late 1930s, and from Laura’s point of view in 2007. Whispering Stories was established in 2015. The blog is here to share our love of books and the bookish world, alongside our other passions in life. We are based in the UK.

The Frequency of Us: A BBC2 Between the Covers book club pick

Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks. Home > Come with me to our cellar, you’ll be safe with us. I’m sure Elsa will sing to you. Some of the songs she has been teaching you on the piano, perhaps?’ I listened to the excellent narration by both Elliot Chapman (Will) and Katy Sobey (Laura), which really brought the story to life. It's a dual time line, split between the present day and WWII, centred around the bombing of Bath. Both were well done but I think I marginally favoured the descriptions of the past. We think it’s the perfect book club choice and asked Keith to write a set of questions for book clubs to use when discussing the novel!No one has heard of Elsa Klein. They say he was never married. Seventy years later, Laura is a social worker battling her way out of depression and off medication. Her new case is a strange, isolated old man whose house hasn't changed since the war. A man who insists his wife vanished many, many years before. Everyone thinks he's suffering dementia. But Laura begins to suspect otherwise . . . A cold chill went up my spine. ‘What? Are you sure?’ My shirt still unbuttoned, I joined her at the window and looked out toward the end of the garden. Sure enough, there was light seeping from beneath the workshop door. A shadow moved inside.