“I am not interested in your fine calibrations of empathy or your great mission to protect the river of history. I just to live my own life, and I want to spend it having my own private fucked-up little emotions.”

Are you familiar with the wonderful book resource IndieBound?  Well not only do they have a fantastic website where you can find oodles of book based goodness, they also put out a list each month called the Indie Next List! (Here is a link to July 2013's list)  I have found so many great book recommendations on these lists and I love that they support indie bookstores! I'm mentioning all this because this resource is how I found one of the best book's I've read this year, THE RIVER OF NO RETURN by Bee Ridgway.

What drew me to grabbing this particular book was two things: 1) Pretty cover! (so maybe I do judge books on their cover a smidge...) 2)  The review claimed that this was the perfect book for Deborah Harkness and Diana Gabaldon fans.  As one of many who eagerly awaits the last installment in Harkeness' All Souls Trilogy and the next book in Gabaldon's wildly popular (and my personal favourite) Outlander series, this pretty much sold me the book on the spot.

I was heading down to Portland by train and this was what I brought with me for the many hours I would be stuck in transit.  I made a very good choice.  What a wonderful debut novel and yes, it does have echoes of Harkness and Gabaldon in it!  I'm really excited about where this series is going to go (because yes, it is the first in a planned series and/or trilogy I believe....it better be or my god what a place to end the story!)  A must for time-travel fans, historical fiction fans, and those that just enjoy a really good story!

“You are now a member of the Guild . There is no return.” Two hundred years after he was about to die on a Napoleonic battlefield, Nick Falcott, soldier and aristocrat, wakes up in a hospital bed in modern London. The Guild, an entity that controls time travel, showers him with life's advantages. But Nick yearns for home and for one brown-eyed girl, lost now down the centuries. Then the Guild asks him to break its own rule. It needs Nick to go back to 1815 to fight the Guild’s enemies and to find something called the Talisman.

In 1815, Julia Percy mourns the death of her beloved grandfather, an earl who could play with time. On his deathbed he whispers in her ear: “Pretend!” Pretend what? When Nick returns home as if from the dead, older than he should be and battle scarred, Julia begins to suspect that her very life depends upon the secrets Grandfather never told her. Soon enough Julia and Nick are caught up in an adventure that stretches up and down the river of time. As their knowledge of the Guild and their feelings for each other grow, the fate of the future itself is hanging in the balance.