Started: 22.11.25
Finished: 10.12.25
Hardback - library book - switched to Kindle
I was really looking forwards to reading this, but I wasn't very happy to receive a huge hardback copy from the library; I think the size was putting me off reading it so I bought it on Kindle and switched to that from Chapter 12 onwards.
It is telling the story of Annie Hebbley, a maid on Titanic who, along with several other passengers, believes that something sinister is aboard. Then, disaster strikes.
Four years later, the world is at war, and having survived the events of 1912, Annie now finds herself employed as a nurse on the Britannic, the Titanic's sister ship, which is being used as a hospital ship. One of the wounded soldiers brought aboard is Mark, a man she knew on Titanic, and whom she believed had drowned.
The timeline shifts between 1912 and 1916 and although it clearly states it each time, I still sometimes get a bit confused about which ship I'm on!
Finished, and enjoyed it. A slow start, but like I said, that might've been me being put off by the size of the library book. Once I got going, I was interested to see how it was all going to come together.
If I understood it correctly, it seems that Annie had actually died back in her home village in Ireland. She'd got pregnant by the local priest, who then chose the church over her, and she miscarried. I think she walked into the sea and drowned.
Meanwhile, Mark was in a relationship with someone called Lillian. He was a gambler who'd taken all her savings. She worked in a dressmaking factory, but then was noticed by the owner who 'promoted' her to work in the shop ('salon'), delivering dresses to high society women. One of those women was a wealthy young widow called Caroline. There was a hint of a slightly-more-than-platonic love between them. Caroline invited Mark and Lillian to live with her. When Lillian became pregnant, Caroline offered to pay them to allow her to raise the baby as her own. She had a ticket booked for Titanic as she was returning to her family in America.
In the meantime, Mark and Caroline were falling for each other too. Lillian realised what was happening, which was confirmed when she found another Titanic ticket amongst Marks things. Her mental health in decline, she committed suicide by jumping into the Thames.
I think there was an Irish folklore element running through the book, where a 'goddess of the sea' offered Lillian the 'body' of Annie, in return for her delivering an innocent (her child, Ondine, who was travelling on Titanic with the newly-married Mark and Caroline). And this is how Annie came to be a stewardess on Titanic.
On the fateful night, she saw Caroline and Ondine fall out of a lifeboat, and tried to rescue them both, but eventually had to let Caroline go. She tried to take Ondine back to Mark who was still on the sinking ship - Annie didn't know that she was Lillian at this point, but she knew that there was something drawing her to Mark all the time.
Four years later, she's a nurse on the Britannic, which picks Mark up as an injured soldier. I don't remember it saying how he'd survived Titanic. At this point it all gets a bit confusing to me, because this was the part where Annie seemed to realise that she was in fact Lillian, or at least, her spirit, who had come back for Mark. But then Mark realised that the only way to end it all was to steer the ship into a channel full of German mines and blow it up, which he did. Annie's friend Violet Jessop survived; she'd also survived Titanic, and is actually a real person. Annie snapped out of the 'Lillian enchantment' that she was in long enough to sound the alarm bells just before they struck the mine, saving some lives on the ship.
So yeah, not bad.
