I’ve always had difficulties reading books about time travel, but ”The Kingdoms” solves all the doubts that raises during the story. Pulley, Natasha (2019). The Lost Future of Pepperharrow. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-63557-330-5. OCLC 1042353069.

Eilean Mor hat sofort was bei mir klingeln lassen und mich an das Buch "Die Leuchtturmwärter" von Emma Stonex denken lassen. Denn es ist genau dieser Leuchtturm, der auch in dieser Geschichte eine Rolle spielt. Denn dort sind im Jahr 1900 tatsächlich drei Wärter auf mysteriöse Weise verschwunden und auch Natasha Pulley bindet dieses Ereignis gekonnt in ihren Roman mit ein. This book is not for everyone. It's...complicated and horrible and aching, it's full of sharp edges and burn scars and murder, it's about history and love and what those two concepts do to people. It's about ships. And telegraphs. Lighthouses and time travel. Tortoises. Abuse and the decisions that lead to it. There are a lot of reasons why people will not like this book. It’s a time travel book and it’s a mystery, and it’s literally about changing history. There are giant ships fighting, there are guns, there is so much violence & blood in that book. It could probably not be more eventful. And yet at its very core, The Kingdoms is about love. People generally agree that it’s harder to review books you’ve enjoyed; that it’s harder to find the words to describe all the ways in which you loved a book, than it is to explain why you hated it. This statement, for me, has never been more true than right now.

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the thing is, pulley doesn’t write romance per se: she writes books about love. at its core, everything that happens is because of the love that the characters have for each other. the whole idea of how home is a person, that soft but intense yearning. the epitome of fist fighting fate for a shot at reuniting with your person. For those familiar with fantasy tropes it is immediately obvious we have an alternative history… but this is so much more.

While an open-minded reader may guess at some of the book’s twists before they’re revealed, personally it made the book no less enjoyable to read for the mere fact that they’re clever.

I haven’t even mentioned what the story is actually about yet (which I think speaks to how much my enjoyment of it was down to emotional connection, though that’s not to say the plot isn’t also great). It starts in 1898, as a man named Joe steps off a train and realises he has lost all his memories. He finds himself in a world that is unfamiliar – to him, naturally, but also to us, as this is an alternate history in which the UK is under French rule. The London skyline is dominated by massive steelworks, households still keep slaves, and Edinburgh is occupied by a terrorist group known as the Saints. Author Natasha Pulley’s perhaps most prevalent theme when you consider her list of works as a whole is the concept of time – whether it’s knowing the future, seeing the past unfurl before your eyes in the forms of ghosts, or in the case of her new novel The Kingdoms, seeing the web of timelines, present, future, and potential, unravel and reshape before your very eyes as a consequence of your actions.

An Oxford physicist named Grace Carrow happens to interfere unwittingly, causing Thaniel to be torn between two opposing loyalties. The novel turned out to be an entertaining and sweeping read. Its atmospheric narrative tends to take the reader on a mesmerizing journey through London of the Victorian era and Japan at the time of its crumbling civil war. Author Pulley has done a fantastic job of combining historical events with interesting, fancy flights. The original story and mind-blowing characters enabled the book to reach out to readers in huge numbers. Author Pulley’s wonderful style of writing and original story helped the book win the Betty Trask prize in 2016. Following the tremendous success of the book, Pulley began working on the second volume of the series and published it with much more success and popularity. The mystery of the lighthouse has ties to more than a century earlier when the English and French were fighting the Napoleonic Wars and the outcome of the world hung in the balance. With a focus on Missouri Kite, a British sea captain whose ship is crewed by a mixture of sailors, women, and children, Pulley not only offers a look at a war that went differently, but also explores the mechanics of time travel and the potential for disrupting timelines. Although the heart of the book is the mysterious relationship between Kite, his sister Agatha Castlereigh, and Jem, Agatha's husband from a different time. She grafts her story onto a detailed and realistic look at life aboard sailing ships during the early nineteenth century, providing the reader with a sense of verisimilitude. Pulley made something truly masterful here, balancing technique and structure with so much dazzling, ineffable intimacy in a way that makes it impossible not to stop and gawk. The resulting work is a book that you can’t read without wanting to talk about it. A novel with so much to say about war and civilization, trauma and memory, love and sacrifice—and the people heartbreakingly caught up in it. I didn't connect with any of the characters, maybe except for Agatha, but didn't sympathize or cared about anyone.

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Natasha Pulley (born 4 December 1988) is a British author. She is best known for her debut novel, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, which won a Betty Trask Award. For fans of The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and David Mitchell, a genre bending, time twisting alternative history that asks whether it’s worth changing the past to save the future, even if it costs you everyone you’ve ever loved. I have no idea why the protagonist Joe, and his love interest Kite "fell in love". From Kite's perspective I get it: we are bashed over the head with how charming and handsome Joe is meant to be (though it hardly shows up in his actual actions, and really only when the plot demands he be charming to get something the plot needs for him). From Joe's perspective though, it seemed... proximity based affection? Otherwise, their love story got lost in the fugue that shrouds the rest of the novel. At some point it becomes a thing between them to (barf) give tattoos as expressions of affection. before i get dramatic i want to highlight how my first reaction to this book was < “i’m ugly and poor” me too, kite, me too > because like. lmao mood.)