When Angie Moland was born the nurse placed her in her mother’s arms, who then adamantly proclaimed that she was not her baby. Because her mother had been expecting a boy, a boy who would make her father happy. In Fighting the Rapture Angie tells the harrowing story of her life, of a young black girl, unwanted from birth, who was then passed from pillar to post as she fought to find her place in the world.

This book begins with snow, the story of you.

It is a freezing room in a student house, a sagging mattress on the floor, and two people, one nineteen, the other twenty, kissing passionately, all night.

It is to this scene that, twenty years later, Rosy, the narrator of Julie Myerson’s astonishing novel, returns obsessively. She has just lost a child in a terrible, careless accident, and Tom, her partner, has taken her to Paris to forget about things, to start again. It has snowed in the night and, waking at dawn, Rosy decides to go for a walk. At the hotel desk there’s a note for her: ‘I’m waiting for you X.’ And he is, sitting in the corner of a cafe as she enters almost at random. They talk. He touches her. She turns away and when she looks again he is gone.

Was he there? Had she dreamed him? And why, when he e-mails her out of the blue two days later, does he write as though they haven’t met for twenty years?

I was drawn into this book from the very first page, and Nicola does a wonderful job of weaving a tale with so many twists and turns, that I didn’t know whodunnit until the last page. I couldn’t even begin to tell you what happened in this book as it is so wonderfully complex, yet simple to follow along as you read it.

The characters are quirky and believable, and it’s always good to throw in a little romantic tension in a “will they won’t they” fashion!

If you have a few hours to spare and you want to escape from the world then download this book to your Kindle and get reading