We know that Clara/Charlotte was taken, so the mystery is why. I don’t want to say much more about the plot as part of the beauty of this book is discovering it as you go along. And that she was the one who claimed her… Six years later she finally has enough money saved to return but is told that Clara was claimed the day after being left. When Clara is accepted, Bess vows to one day return and claim back her little girl, leaving behind a token of half a heart made out of whalebone and carved with their initials so she can be identified. Unable to raise her she has come for the monthly raffle to try and give her child a chance of survival. The story is narrated by Bess and Alexandra, two very different women from two very different walks of life, and begins on a cold night in November 1747 when Bess, an impoverished shrimp hawker, arrives at the London Foundling Hospital with her newborn daughter, Clara. It is very different from her debut novel, The Familiars, but again Halls has infused this story with her exquisite, pitch-perfect prose, luring me in slowly until the world outside this novel no longer existed. The Foundling is a lush, enthralling and lingering read that left me speechless.

Halls has once again created a masterpiece. But her past is threatening to catch up with her and tear her carefully constructed world apart.įrom the bestselling author of The Familiars comes this captivating story of mothers and daughters, class and power, and love against the greatest of odds…

When her close friend – an ambitious young doctor at the Foundling Hospital – persuades her to hire a nursemaid for her daughter, she is hesitant to welcome someone new into her home and her life. Less than a mile from Bess’s lodgings in the city, in a quiet, gloomy townhouse on the edge of London, a young widow has not left the house in a decade. Her life is turned upside down as she tries to find out who has taken her little girl – and why.

Dreading the worst, that Clara has died in care, she is astonished when she is told she has already claimed her. Six years after leaving her illegitimate daughter Clara at London’s Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright returns to reclaim the child she has never known. Two women, bound by a child, and a secret that will change everything…. Thank you to Tracy at Compulsive Readers Tours for the invitation to take part and to Bonnier Zaffre for my gifted copy of this book. Today I am thrilled to be taking part in the blog tour for this phenomenal novel. Genre: Gothic Fiction, Historical Fiction

The Foundling by Stacey Halls