I have been meaning to read The Betrayal by Kate Furnivall since last November and, having met lovely Kate I was dying to get to the book. However, life got in the way and I simply didn’t have any reading time. I took The Betrayal to Uganda on holiday in February and it didn’t make it out of the bag. I took it to India in April and I still didn’t get to it so I promised myself as soon as I’d caught up with books for blog tours it would be my next read. It was so worth the wait!

The Betrayal is published by Simon and Schuster and is available for purchase through these links.

The Betrayal

Could you kill someone? Someone you love?

Paris, 1938. Twin sisters are divided by fierce loyalties and by a terrible secret. The drums of war are beating and France is poised, ready to fall. One sister is an aviatrix, the other is a socialite and they both have something to prove and something to hide.

My Review of The Betrayal

With a shocking murder in her past, aviatrix Romaine finds her life spiralling out of control.

I have been meaning to read The Betrayal since it was released and my goodness was it worth the wait. The Betrayal was so much more than I was expecting. I had thought I was going to read a sweeping romance, and indeed there is great love and passion between its pages, but I hadn’t anticipated the exquisite intensity of emotion and the highly charged pulse racing thriller alongside it. There’s such skill in Kate Furnivall’s writing because she knows exactly how to ensnare the reader so that they couldn’t put down The Betrayal even if they wanted to – which I certainly didn’t. Every chapter has a hook, a surprise and a depth that is, truly, breathtaking. The depictions of grief and joy, of love and hatred, bigotry and compassion all thrum through the story so that reading it felt like a physical experience for me. The title is perfect. There are so many ways in which characters betray one another – and indeed themselves, but to explain more would be to spoil the read for others.

The plot steams along and at times I felt I almost couldn’t bear what was in front of me. Reading The Betrayal felt almost like being part of the action. I wasn’t just reading a fictionalised narrative, but living and breathing the events too. So many times I was taken aback by proceedings. The story itself was given greater depth and realism by being firmly rooted in brilliantly researched history with a cast of real minor characters from the era so that The Betrayal is highly evocative of 1930’s Paris. Even the city of Paris becomes like a living, breathing organism as Kate Furnivall writes so devastatingly well. The Betrayal is a superlative depiction of pre Second World War life making it completely convincing to read.

I adored the characterisation. Romy’s self-destructive nature is completely believable and the balance of vulnerability and feistiness in her so wonderfully portrayed that it is impossible not to experience her life with her. Similarly, all the other people in The Betrayal are authentic and utterly convincing. I loved the counterpoise of Florence and Romaine as twin sisters. There was something so visceral and poignant in their relationship that at times I could hardly withstand reading about them.

I had anticipated that The Betrayal would be a good read. I hadn’t realised just how amazing I would find it. I thought The Betrayal was outstanding and cannot recommend it highly enough.

About Kate Furnivall

Kate Furnivall didn’t set out to be a writer. It sort of grabbed her by the throat when she discovered the story of her grandmother – a White Russian refugee who fled from the Bolsheviks down into China. That extraordinary tale inspired her first book, The Russian Concubine. From then on, she was hooked.

Kate is the author of eight novels, including The Russian Concubine, The White Pearl and The Italian Wife. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages and have been on the New York Times Bestseller list.

You can follow Kate on Twitter @KateFurnivall, visit her website and find her on Facebook.