The McKernan Literary Agency & Consultancy

From the Daily Mail, 4 January 2008

Hotel Juliet by Belinda Seaward

Africa and aviation, red dust and wide white skies. The ingredients might be clichéd, but this romance will soon dispel those January blues. We begin in Zambia in 1972, with an amputation meatily rendered. The subject of the operation is Max, an enigmatic pilot and plantation owner who has recently sustained a bullet to the leg. By his bedside is an impulsive young woman, Elise - a woman whom we meet again in London twenty-four years later, planning her adoptive African daughter's marriage. But Memory, unlike her mother, is in no rush to get hitched. Indeed, she is about to walk out on her partner and her career to pursue the truth about her turbulent, possibly tragic, Zambian childhood.

Navigating confidently between Britain and Africa, Belinda Seaward gradually establishes the links between Max, Elise and Memory, as well as Paul Cougan (the earnest student to whom Elise was married) and the once-glamorous light aircraft, the Hotel Juliet. A thrillingly observant writer and crafter of highly sensual prose, Seaward throughout employs the language and lore of the skies to considerable metaphorical effect. While it may not be the most original of novels, its richly descriptive escapism is seductive.