The Kingdoms

By Natasha Pulley

SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA GOLD CROWN
LONGLISTED FOR THE BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION 2021 BEST NOVEL

For fans of Matt Haig, Stuart Turton and Bridget Collins comes a sweeping historical adventure from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

'Original, joyous and horrifying, The Kingdoms is an awe-inspiring feat of imagination and passion which had me in tears by the end' - Catriona Ward

Come home, if you remember

The postcard has been held at the sorting office for ninety-one years, waiting to be delivered to Joe Tournier. On the front is a lighthouse – Eilean Mor, in the Outer Hebrides.

Joe has never left England, never even left London. He is a British slave, one of thousands throughout the French Empire. He has a job, a wife, a baby daughter.

But he also has flashes of a life he cannot remember and of a world that never existed – a world where English is spoken in England, and not French.

And now he has a postcard of a lighthouse built just six months ago, that was first written nearly one hundred years ago, by a stranger who seems to know him very well.

Joe's journey to unravel the truth will take him from French-occupied London to a remote Scottish island, and back through time itself as he battles for his life – and for a very different future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: May 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526623133

Natasha Pulley

Natasha Pulley is the internationally bestselling author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, The Bedlam Stacks, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, The Kingdoms, and The Half Life of Valery K. She has won a Betty Trask Award, been shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award, and the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. She lives in Bristol, England.

Reviews for The Kingdoms

[mbmackay · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well, this one was different! A fictional history (my term for alternate history) crossed with time travel.The plot is complex - people move across a jump in time of 94 years, and often forget who they were/become. I read this book over the Christmas break, so celebrations and grandchildren may have distracted me - but I think the plot structure was the main reason I struggled for coherence. Time travel is inherently nonsense, so it the author's right to have whatever hoops and hurdles they want attached to the process. I went along for the ride, and enjoyed it. The characters are vivid, although everyone seemed to be more thann a little exceptional. A little more ordinariness might have helped. The plot concept is pretty amazing, but very engaging. What if the UK hadn't won at Trafalgar? If Waterloo hadn't happend? If future technology leaked selectively into the past? The whole thing is probably over-complicated, but it hooked me, and I loved being brought along with the it.

[tikimoof · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hrm. Reading this book felt a lot like my feelings on Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, where I was desperate to see the end but didn't really agree with it when it came.

It was a great read! I hadn't realized I could feel so many flavors of sadness. But I'm not sure if the ends justified the means.

[capewood · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

2022 book #12. 2021. Seemed like an interesting story of alt history (the French won the Napoleonic Wars) and time travel but it got confusing and bogged down and I gave up about 3/4 through.

[souloftherose · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've enjoyed all of Natasha Pulley’s books and I think this one is her best yet. It’s a heart-achingly beautiful but melancholy timeslip novel opening with our protagonist, Joe, arriving by train in a French-speaking London in 1898 with no memory of starting his journey. Everything seems wrong to him as it does to the reader as we discover the French won the Napoleonic Wars and England is now a French colony. As Joe struggles to understand what has happened to him he receives a postcard from a lighthouse in Scotland asking him to come home, but the postcard is dated from 91 years ago. I don’t want to say too much more about the plot but this will definitely be one of my favourite books of the year.

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Starting in an alternate 1900 London, 93 years after the British lost to Napoleon and England became a backwater colony of the Paris and many English live as bonds slaves to French masters. Joe arrives in London with no memory, a sever case of an amnesia that is more mildly affecting many. We follow him through a series of encounters which become more and more adventurous and do learn much of what has happened and why in this strangely involving story of two damaged and displaced men and some intense women. Some disappearances and deaths are overly convenient for my taste, and I might have rated it as high as 4.5 if the obstacles were elegantly rather than arbitrarily banished.

[marklacy-355086 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a very interesting book, from the characters to the action to the settings and the plot, and I enjoyed reading it. I might've enjoyed it even more if I'd been able to keep straight the jumps in time and alternate histories, but I believe that was more due to the type of novel and not the author's skill. Having "discovered" Natasha Pulley, I will now have to take a look at her other works.

[invisiblelizard · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the fourth Natasha Pulley book I've read (having gone through her first 4 books in the order in which they were published) and I like them less and less as I go along. She's a great writer, but I feel her best story was her first (Watchmaker) and she keeps trying to duplicate that success. In this book she creates an alternate history-slash-time traveling tale that spans the hundred years in the 19th century and posits the question: what would the world look like if the French won the Napoleonic Wars; and, further, what if that victory was due to accidental time travelers who hopped back 100 years and gave the French a century's worth of technological advancements and historical information to help them succeed; and, even further, what if the time traveling business wasn't actually finished and the "future" was constantly in flux?An interesting idea and an admirable task she set herself, to write all of this down and make a cohesive story out of it. Alas, sadly, in my opinion, cohesion didn't quite make it into the final draft. The nonlinear nature of her story combined with the time traveling and the way in which the future changes (sometimes) and people can forget things that just happened because history is constantly rewriting itself—I'm exhausted just writing all of that—leads to a great deal of confusion when reading this book.I think the way to enjoy it is not to think too much about (a) the rules of time travel that she employs and even goes to some trouble explaining early on, and (b) just accept whatever she writes and move on. My problem was I tried to keep it all in my head, and I think I would have needed to have taken copious notes from the start to keep all of the plot threads straight in my mind. Instead I kept getting confused about who was where and when because she kept bouncing around in time so much. Much of that, I feel, was unnecessary, and I'll explain why in a spoiler-rich segment below, so be warned: Okay, she went to too much effort to hide the fact that Jem and Joe were the same person. When Jem returned to his present of 1898, his future had already changed completely due to France winning the war and basically occupying all of Britain, thus his own memory quickly faded and the person he was (Jem) faded with that and he became the person he would have been (Joe) had he been born in this new future, although with amnesia (?) such that he didn't remember any of Joe's history. Except his name. Okay, whatever, that's really confusing to me even after finishing the entire book. The point is: Pulley wanted the Jem/Joe reveal to be a big surprise twist toward the end, but it was pretty obvious early on. And frankly the story would have been better if she'd just told it from Jem/Joe's point of view in a more linear fashion. It would have read something like this: Jem, on board a scientific ship called The Kingdom, gets pulled almost 100 years into the past where the ship and most of her crew are captured by the French who use their knowledge to change the course of history, but meanwhile Jem meets Kite, a sailor in the British Navy, and they have adventures, but eventually Jem misses his family and wants to go back to 1898, so he does and brings Kite with him, but once there Jem transforms into Joe (see above) and forgets who Kite is, so Kite goes back to 1805, where he is seriously losing the war to the French, and mails a postcard to Joe to be held 90+ years and delivered on the date that Joe (who is a slave, by the way, I forgot to mention that) is freed, showing him the location of the very rip in time that brought Jem to Kite in the first place, and of course Joe investigates and goes back through the rip and (re-)meets Kite and they have more adventures, but Kite is sad because Joe still doesn't remember him and Kite literally kills people before they can tell Joe that he is really Jem, but this time when Joe (of course!) eventually goes back to his own time, all Kite has to do is follow him and tell him about his previous life/lives and he remembers all about it, which is the very thing Kite murdered people to keep from happening throughout most of the book. On second thought, while that narrative would have made a lot more sense, with no bouncing back and forth in time and hiding the truth of who Joe really was, it would certainly have pointed a spotlight on a lot of plot holes that were otherwise obfuscated by the convoluted way in which she laid all of this out.Okay, that's the end of the major spoilers. One minor spoiler I'll give and I think it's fine to do so since I've seen it in many reviews I've read so far: it does have a surprisingly happy ending. For a book that leaves a shocking amount of carnage in its wake, she wraps it up on an optimistic note. Which is good because after 436 pages of time traveling chaos that I could barely make sense of, if she'd ended the book by saying, "And then everybody died," I would probably have thrown it across the room. At least I was able to smile at the end and say to myself, "Well, I guess that was nice."Back to where I started with this rant: I don't think I'm going to seek out any more of Pulley's books. Not for a while at least. I got sucked into this one because the blurb on the back said it was "for fans of The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and David Mitchell." Well, I'm a fan of both, quite seriously, and this book wasn't for me. At all.