The Villa by Rachel Hawkins – Book review

The Villa by Rachel Hawkins is a tantalising little read that combines so many elements I love. We have a dual-time storyline, a high-drama murder, characters based on real people, Gothic-tinged deceit and glorious Italian settings.

Opening sentence: Houses remember.

Mari & Emily

Mari Godwick and Emily McCrae are our dual narrators. Mari’s story takes place in July 1974, while Emily is in the present day. What they have in common is the villa – Villa Rosato, later renamed Villa Aestas, to be precise.

Emily and Chess are childhood best friends, both writers. Emily is known for her cozy detective Petal Bloom Mysteries. She has writer’s block on her current manuscript and is tempted to write something different. Coupled with the fact she’s getting divorced, when Chess (writer of self-help books, Instagram star) asks her to go on a writing retreat to Italy, she can’t say no.

They stay in Orvieto, in Villa Aestas where, in 1974, Mari Godwick, her step-sister, Lara Larchmont (who writes an album, Aestas that summer in the villa that goes on to achieve basically Rumours status), her boyfriend and a rock star had stayed. Their trip was eventful, cumulating in a murder… It was also where Mari writes what will go on to become her seminal work of Gothic horror, Lilith Rising.

I became interested in the link between a horror classic and the real-life horror that unfolded at the villa where I was staying.

Emily becomes fascinated by Mari’s story and the secrets she feels she is close to discovering in the villa. But can any good really come of it for Emily?

Part murder mystery, part Emily finding herself, The Villa fuses the two timelines, builds up suspense and fascinatingly draws on real life events…

Mari Shelley

So yes, the character based on a real person is indeed Mari. She basically is Mary Shelley (1979-1851), if she were alive in the 1970s. Like Mari, she wrote her first iconic work of literature (Frankenstein) as a teenager, her maiden name was Godwin to Mari’s Godwick, also like Mari her mother was a writer who died just after she was born and her father a philosopher.

There are many more similarities too (pretty much her whole life) that you will pick up on if you read The Villa, but the most relevant one here is that Mary Shelley went on a life-changing trip to Geneva with her step-sister, boyfriend and not a rock star but fellow writer and stayed in Villa Diodati. She also spent time in Italy.

Stories change depending on who’s telling them.

A sense of unease

I know you won’t agree with every decision a character makes, but there is something that Emily does – a version of events she chooses to believe that has severe consequences – that just really didn’t sit right with me in terms of the story. But as uncomfortable feelings and bad decisions are all part of the mix here, maybe that’s exactly what I was supposed to think.

I love novels that draw on real life events and by reimagining Mary Shelley’s infamous Swiss gathering and layering in a murder mystery and dual timeline element too, The Villa cements itself as a clever, engaging page-turner. I highly enjoyed it.

• Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC;
• Get your copy of The Villa here;
• Paperback published by Headline 6th July 2023;
• 290 pages;
• My rating: