I haven’t read Stacey Halls’s debut novel The Familiars, but had heard great things of it so was full of trepidation when it came to reading the notoriously difficult second book. I really shouldn’t have worried though. The pitch-perfect prose brings Georgian London to vivid life, and strongly engages us with the central protagonist Bess Bright. She has had to give up her newborn baby Clara and the story follows her quest years later to find her daughter again. The reader really feels for her as she persists and persists. It makes lots of points about social divisions in the eighteenth (and twenty-first?) centuries and what it means to be a mother, all wrapped up in a page-turning narrative. The end result a charming tale with a heartwarmingly happy conclusion.