I really loved the way this book decided to take on time-travel. I especially enjoyed the "outsider" perspective on how what happened in the past changed the future even as it was happening.

I will admit, it took a little bit for me to get into this book. And a few of the twists were easy to figure out, which just means that the foreshadowing was definitely there.

This book wrapped up really well. While I"m not sure I'd be interested in another book set in this world, I'm definitely interested in reading any future books that Natasha Pulley writes.

The Kingdoms. What a stunner of a book. So rarely has a novel captured my imagination so entirely, that I feel as if a part of my soul was left in the pages. The Kingdoms is an answer to the big what-if. What if you traveled back in time—would you change history? Or would history change you?

Joe awakens at a train station with no memory of his past, save for a lingering sense of déjà vu and disquiet. In Joe’s England, everyone speaks French, slavery is widespread and commonplace, and only a small pocket of English terrorists fight on in Scotland. Joe does his best to fit into a world he no longer remembers. But when an impossible post card arrives for him, Joe finds himself traveling to a lighthouse by the Isle of Harris, searching for clues to his amnesia. When he arrives, Joe unwittingly slips back through time and straight into a 100-year-old war. Captured by Captain Kite of the English Navy, Joe is pressed to tell the English about future technology in the desperate hope it will help them defeat the French. So begins Joe’s twisting history with Kite and the slow unraveling of the world he knows, piece by piece.

Natasha Pulley has given us a Victorian time-travel, alternate universe, historical fiction, soulmate love-and-war story and somehow made it all fit seamlessly into one book. Time travel can quickly complicate or unnecessarily bog down a story, but Pulley crafts this one with such a deft hand that there was not a moment I questioned Kite and Joe’s reality. Everything felt utterly believable, from fractures in time to tempestuous naval battles, and I was engrossed in the entangled lives of the characters. The Kingdoms evoked such a depth of emotion in me, a sharp contrast to the emotional suppression of Kite, his sister Agatha, and the English resistance fighters during the war. Joe and Kite are broken repeatedly, yet unerringly find themselves returning to each other time after time.

I’m telling you, this book hit me over the head and stole my lunch money and I want to thank it (and Pulley) from the bottom of my heart for even existing. The Kingdoms is something I never knew I needed, and now desperately crave. It took me a few days to even process that the book was over, I was so floored by this book. Flawed characters and an evocative writing style give The Kingdoms a truly unique quality that will leave you quietly yearning for another life. Fans of V. E. Schwab will rejoice after experiencing Natasha Pulley’s latest. 10/10, wish I could read it for the first time over and over again.

Special thanks to Bloomsbury USA and Netgalley for providing me an advanced reader copy so that I could give an honest and unbiased review!

Several months ago, I attended an online book conversation with Tana French and Marlon James. He asked her to recommend a book, and she mentioned "The Watchmaker of Filigree Street" by Natasha Pulley. A recommendation from Tana French is high praise, and when I had the opportunity to read Pulley's newest book, "The Kingdoms," I jumped at the opportunity.

From the very first pages, this book absorbed my full attention. It opens with a man arriving in London on a train, and immediately noting that the city seemed strange to him. When asked, he didn't know his own name. A kindly stranger took our character to a local hospital. Over the course of a few days, people from his life come to claim him. They say his name is Joe Tournier, and they've known him all his life. Nothing is familiar to him.

I was deeply intrigued by the mystery: who is our main character? Why does London seem so strange to him? Why doesn't he recognize anyone from his life?

As Joe gradually settles into his life, it continues to feel strange and poorly suited to him. Nothing seems right. The only thing he has is a mysterious postcard with a picture of a lighthouse . . . and an invitation to return to it.

Every part of this book fascinated me. I loved the characters. The setting--this strange London--was disturbing and compelling. I could not stop reading and finished the book in less than a day. (I may have taken a break to sleep in the middle, but it was under protest--I wanted to keep reading!)

Once the book was done, I fully agreed with Tana French. Natasha Pulley told a deftly plotted story, one that intrigued me and kept me guessing. I recommend this book highly.

This is an unusual and captivating novel that is truly genre bending. It's not exactly time travel, more like time weaving and includes alternate histories including Napoleon conquering Great Britain. The main character, Joe weaves in an out of various times and places. Pulley is a delicate writer and the book starts slowly and builds in excitement and intrigue. It is very good and defies adequate description. A very enjoyable read.

This started strong but as it went on, it just dragged. It felt that the "big reveal" was designed to surprise readers, but readers who are reading a book like this, are not surprised. We get it. I think it could have survived by being roughly 50 pages lighter and much tighter. Pulley is so good with her ability to drop the reader into a world that just feels real and lived in. I never felt lost with the alternate history, but as the time jumps just kept coming and coming and I had already figured out the reveal, I was just counting down the pages. Glad I read it. Glad it is out there.

OK. This isn't going to be my usual kind of review because The Kingdoms isn't the usual kind of book. I'm sitting here weeping with joy and sorrow both and just wanting to go back and read it again so I can keep making the complicated whole of it clearer and clearer. So much happens, and it's not hard to follow, but as soon as you're done you want to start reading again to see what you missed on the previous journey through the book. And—it's set on a boat and I hate maritime fiction, so if you want proof that it's brilliant, there you have it.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

[This review will be posted on NetGalley, LibraryThing, and EdelweissPlus.]

This book was simply fantastic! Time travel AND alternative futures. I found that enthralling! Can people change the future by going back and changing the past, yet still remain... THEM? It was such a great premise and was carried out so well. I can't help but recommend this one to people when they ask me.

I am kind of in the middle on this book. There were some great parts where I felt really connected to the story, and I didn't want to put the book down, but then there were other parts that I really struggled to get through. At times I felt completely confused about what was going on, at others, I knew right where we were. Overall, I think that there are readers that this book is perfect for, and others that will find it to be a bit off from what they would normally read.

Wow. That was kind of brilliant.

Check out the premise of this book:
Amnesia.
Time travel.
Alternate history.

Awesome, right??

<img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/SPXNpXZraJ6X6/giphy.gif">

It opens with Joe getting off a train in London. He has no memory of anything before that moment. He finds everything in French; it turns out England is a French colony, and he’s not sure if that’s normal or not.

He eventually finds his way to a lighthouse and then a ship. Each segment of the story is quite distinct, and it’s quite a while before the ship shows up, so it took me some time to realize that some of these shipmates were main characters that I was supposed to care about. I was a little confused at times by what felt like sudden shifts in scene or dialogue. It may have just been me.

There is a lot of suspense and mystery here and lots of FEELS. I wasn’t expecting that, but there are some super poignant moments here. After the ending, read the beginning again. Try not to cry. I dare you.

<img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/SNbtSYpMqWCCA/giphy.gif">

There’s a lot of rep here, I guess, but you don’t even find out Joe’s ethnicity until the very end. He’s a person first.

A wonderful book combining fantasy and historical fiction. I love me a good time travel book, especially one as meticulously plotted and full of memorable characters such as this.

The Kingdoms is about a man named Joe Tournier who has a really bad case of amnesia - or does he?? The story starts off in 1898 in a French occupied London. Joe is at the train station but he doesn't remember anything about himself or how he got there. Someone helps him get to a hospital where they tell him he has had an epileptic seizure but Joe doesn't know what to think. He finds himself realizing that he can understand the French language but he feels English. He thinks he remembers having a wife named Madeline but can't remember what she looks like. After several days of not remembering anything, people come to claim Joe. They say he's a slave and is married to a woman named Alice. That can't be right.... But she has a picture of the two of them. Joe doesn't remember and can't argue against it, so he goes with them. A little while late a postcard with the picture of Lighthouse is addressed to him. However it's from the early 1800s. Thus, Joe's journey to figure out who is and what happened to him begins.

I can't take say too much without giving away spoilers so I will keep this brief. The book has some interesting time twists and I found it easy to read. It got me out of a major reading slump, in fact! It kept me wondering who Joe was as much as Joe wondered who he was. However, some parts were a little confusing and not really fully explained but I don't think it took away from the story. Overall, I enjoyed the read.

Joe Tournier had no memories before getting off the train in London. He was confused as to why all London names were in French and that he spoke perfect French, although he thought he was English.
And so we journey with Joe, in 1898. He finds out that he is a slave with a wife, whom he doesn't remember. He receives a postcard of a lighthouse in Scotland, that was posted 90 years ago but just delivered to him. And on becoming a freed man he becomes a welder to support his family. But when the lighthouse from his postcard needs repairs, he volunteers to go and fix it, leaving his family behind, to go find his past.
An alternate history, fantasy, mystery, with Joe taken back to 1807, meeting people from his past and piecing together his different future self.
An enjoyable and expanding story that fits together beautifully at the end.
Thank you Bloomsbury Press and NetGalley for this e-galley of "The Kingdoms".

When I saw that this book was for fans of 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, I put The Kingdoms on my TBR list immediately. I was fascinated by Evelyn Hardcastle, but I don’t know if I can say the same about The Kingdoms. This book left me feeling more confused and uncomfortable than anything else.

The first problem I had was that after Joe finally slips back in time, the author bounces back and forth and all around in the timeline so much that I’d get lost as to whether she was writing about what was currently happening or scenes from the characters’ pasts. And it took me forever to get through this book, because there were all these tiny little threads, which she did pull together at the end, but which made for a long and, frankly, overly complicated story.

But more than that, I found the various relationships in the story to be at best awkward and at worst horrifying. Nobody seemed capable of honesty. Relationships were more of a tool, for everything from power to protection, than a blessing. And the entire plot revolved around these relationships, so they all ultimately made me uncomfortable.

I did enjoy the general idea of the story: how even the smallest changes in the past could so drastically affect the future. The history/alternative history–how she reimagined Britain if the French had been victorious during the Napoleonic Wars–was rather fascinating. But overall, I can’t say that I really liked this novel. I’ll give it three stars, however, for the imagination, but I’m not sure that I’d really recommend it.

Thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for the digital ARC of this novel for review purposes. I was not required to give a positive review. All opinions are my very own! 🙂

The time bending layered stories of David Mitchell have always pulled me in so seeing The Kingdoms compared to his writing immediately intrigued me enough to want to pick it up. As I began to read I found myself confused, filled with as many questions as our main character Joe had. He steps off a train with no memory of his journey or of his life for that matter. The further we step into the story I was expecting to get answers and to become immersed in these two worlds that the characters traversed. Unfortunately by the time I had finished reading I couldn't help but think that this book was over 400 pages long and absolutely nothing of note happened over the course of it.

So our main character, Joe is a slave in the world that he occupies after coming off the train. His apparent amnesia is attributed to epilepsy which doctors have used as the explanation for numerous cases of amnesia happening across the country. As time passes, he forces himself to settle into this life even though he doesn't quite think he belongs in it until a postcard addressed to him from nearly 100 years prior arrives. This postcard sends Joe on a path to a lighthouse which he believes will hold all of the answers that he is wanting.

Now from this point on in the book revealing the plot would contain many spoilers simply because of the time travel aspects of it so I'm going to remain vague in the rest of my review. As Joe explored the lighthouse and tried to uncover anything that may help him remember his life before the train I was still intrigued and hoping that I too would be satisfied as the plot unfolded. However, instead of the plot gaining traction it continuously fell flat. None of the aspects of this story felt fully explained and I had no idea why anything was happening. It felt like as a reader I was shoved into this world where I was supposed to understand everything that was going on without being told anything. The plot felt disjointed as more narrators were added and their voices all sounded so similar despite the fact that they were all very different types of characters.

In terms of the characters I have to admit that I cared for none of them, save one that was killed for no reason. The characters all seemed to act in ways that were used solely to move the plot forward or cause tension or drama. I understood nothing about their values or their motivations for acting the way they did and I genuinely couldn't understand how certain characters ended up in the positions that they did by the end of the novel. This overall caused me to remain confused and frustrated because I continued to gain only more questions with little to no answers.

By the time I got to the end of the book I couldn't wait to put it down. I did manage to read the entire thing but I gained nothing from the experience. The world that was enclosed within these pages made no sense, the time bending science aspects were given no explanations and I found it all so lackluster and disappointing.

The Kingdoms was full of utterly unrelatable characters in an unnecessarily confusing plot with a time bending storyline that was presented without clear rules. It had an interesting premise that could have been really clever but it turned out to be incredibly bleak and lacking.

The Kingdoms opens with Joe, a man who is struggling with amnesia in a London which is both strange and familiar to him. The doctor claims it's from seizures. As the story progresses, we realize this isn't the case.

The dialogue seemed forced. I didn't feel anything for the characters. They seemed flat. Except maybe Joe because he didn't know what was going on and neither did I.

Mystery and time travel drew me into this book. Why can't Joe remember anything? But the combination of three story lines and a very confusing narrative where much is not explained made this book a DNF for me. I made it 70% in and just couldn't anymore. All three story lines had Kite as a character and one had Joe and another had Jem. With names so close together, it was hard to distinguish what storyline I was reading. The transition between the time lines was not smooth either.

Thank you to Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

Despite having The Watchmaker of Filigree Street on my TBR list for years now, The Kingdoms is somehow the first Natasha Pulley book I’ve ever read. I pre-ordered a physical copy of the book immediately after finishing my ARC, as well as added all her other books to my immediate TBR pile, which tells you a lot about how I feel about The Kingdoms. This is one of those books that make me wish I could read it for the first time all over again, just so I could feel the overwhelming rush of emotions that comes from not knowing what happens in the end.

“Dearest Joe, come home, if you remember. M.” says the postcard Joe Tournier receives in 1898; it has apparently been held at the sorting office for 93 years, so that it could be delivered to him on the date specified. The postcard has a picture of a lighthouse called Eilean Mor in the Outer Hebrides, but Joe doesn’t recognise it. He doesn’t even remember who he is supposed to be, since he lost his memory a while ago. Joe is told that he is a British slave in London, one of the many in the French empire. But he also gets flashes of a life he has supposedly never lived, in an England that’s not ruled by the French and where he can freely speak English.

On an impulse, Joe decides to visit the lighthouse anyway, in search of the truth of his existence. Little does he know that his journey would take him back through time itself to a stranger called Kite who seems to know him better than himself, and would hand him the power to change the very future of his world.

I’m usually not a big fan of books that centre around a romance, but there’s just something about LGBTQ+ romances set in historical periods that always appeals to me, and that was probably the main reason I picked up The Kingdoms. This book is a bit of a hodgepodge of a few different genres as there’s time travel and it’s obviously historical fiction, but there’s also elements of fantasy so seamlessly weaved throughout the story that they almost blend in with the very essence of reality. Pulley’s prose feels ethereal even as it sizzles with dry humour. Pieces of the story take place at multiple places and times, and Pulley paints every single one of those settings with utmost veracity and vividness. Every single aspect of this book was indeed sheer perfection to me, but the romance at the core of the story—that blossomed even amidst all the uncertainty and carnage and hopelessness of war—really was the most beautiful thing about this book.

Joe is the main character in The Kingdoms, but talking about him could give away a bunch of spoilers, so I’ll just say this—I loved him with all my heart and then some. As for the English navy officer Kite, he’s faced abuse all his life, so much so that he’s begun to turn into a bit of a machine, someone who seems incapable of natural human emotions. With a romance that involves a person who doesn’t know who he is, and another who’s barely holding up against emotional and psychological trauma while leading his ship into what seems like a losing battle, it’s understandable that this relationship isn’t one that’d give you unadulterated happiness. And yet, even as these two broken people keep fighting against time to find each other again and again only to lose each other every time, and even as you can’t shake the feeling that they were doomed from the start, you still keep hoping against hope for something good to happen. The Kingdoms is not an easy book, but in the end, Joe and Kite make it worth it.

With The Kingdoms, Pulley has given me a book that I’d forever be recommending to everyone I see, just so I could have someone to scream about this exquisitely beautiful story with. If you like nail biting agony, time travel, alternative history, and super slow burn gay romances with pining and one of the involved parties being oblivious of the other’s feelings, The Kingdoms is the book for you. You could check out Pulley’s other books too, I’ve been told they are all equally heart-wrenching, and I can’t wait to find out for myself.

“... as I’d hope was a sort of physical particle, like an electron, that he needed to send her way to help her get through.”

—————————-

I so wanted to love The Kingdoms. The premise is so interesting, much of it I can’t outline because it would spoil the story. Joe finds himself suffering from apparent amnesia which is starting to become more and more prevalent around London. When he begins to investigate what happened to him he is drawn to an old remote Scottish lighthouse. There things go a little haywire.

The first quarter of the book I was entirely drawn in by Joe and the world around him. But boy did the middle drag something awful. There was entirely too many meandering details in the middle, that were at times interesting but I felt like they added nothing of real value. Lots of tidbits of history that I didn’t know and some I was quite intrigued to see where they went and that kept me going. Although I probably should have DNF-ed but I saw it through. Still not sure whether that was the right decision or just my stubborn need for completion.

Thanks to Netgalley for a copy of this novel. All opinions above are my own.

The elevator pitch is essentially Diana Gabaldon's Outlander meets Diana Wynne Jones' The Time Of The Ghost, with naval battles galore (any Dianas who write about those? I'd be awfully pleased to know it.) Ofc, The Kingdoms isn't quite so rapey as Outlander (thank God) nor as suspenseful as TToTG but is a thoughtful look at time travel and lost identity and fighting for a future you can live with.

Joe Tournier steps off a train in turn of the 20th-century London and has no idea who he is or where he's from. A kindly stranger brings him to a physician, who diagnoses Joe as suffering from an uncommon epileptic affliction which causes sufferers to have such intense and prolonged bouts of deja vu that they're convinced something is amiss with reality. After several days in the Salpetriere asylum, he is claimed by his grateful French owner, who is eager to bring the slave he raised from a young age back home, there to be reunited with Alice, Joe's resentful Jamaican bride. Alice had intended to wed Joe's brother Toby, who died before the formalities could be completed. But since the marriage license was already paid for, and since an unwed Alice would have been stuck in limbo as a slave between households, she married Joe instead, to neither's liking. Joe has memories of someone named Madeline, and is certain he needs to find a way back to her, but how? A mysterious postcard signed M and stamped almost a century earlier asks him to come home if he remembers, and shows a picture of the Eilean Mor lighthouse far in the inaccessible north.

Years pass and Joe thinks he's acclimatized to this strange world without Madeline. He's earned his freedom and become an engineer. He and Alice even have a daughter named Lily, who means the entire world to him. But when given the opportunity to visit the Eilean Mor lighthouse after its keepers disappear and the light fails, he cannot resist the chance to investigate, even if it means running a gauntlet of hostile rebels still loyal to English ideals. The repair job itself is easy but the lighthouse feels like it's outside of time, almost haunted. And that's even before Joe rescues a mysterious man from the sea, launching them both into a desperate fight for the future. The question is, which future?

I really liked how Natasha Pulley drew from British legend and history to construct her tale of changing timelines. The amount of care and research is obvious in the depiction of a Napoleonic England where Admiral Nelson lost at Trafalgar, both in the immediate aftermath of the defeat as well as a century later. I greatly appreciated the diversity on display (even if a small part of me wonders whether Jem was actually gentry or just really good at pretending) and loved all the sailing. But overall, I felt that there was a strange unevenness in tone when dealing with characters, particularly Kite and Agatha. It's hard to root for people who make themselves disagreeable on purpose, and while I get that Kite in particular always felt left out in the cold, self-pity does not sympathy elicit. I'm also still confused as to whether Fred was actually murdered, because if he was, it makes No Damn Sense why. The tonal unevenness extends as well to the mystery of who Joe really is: it was intriguing in the beginning, but by the time he confronted Herault, I didn't really care because it honestly did not feel like it mattered to the story at all.

So this was a weird one for me because it had so many elements that I love, but I did not overall love this book. I think that better shaping and pacing would have helped a lot with the tone issues, as TK seems to abandon interest in being a mystery in favor of being a romance about three quarters of the way through. Porque no los dos, Ms Pulley? It's definitely an interesting premise tho, and the historical/speculative/naval stuff is aces.

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley was published May 25 2021 by Bloomsbury and is available from all good booksellers, including <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/15382/9781635576085">Bookshop!</a>

"The Kingdoms" is a cross-genre work of speculative fiction built around the grandfather paradox -- not in the narrow sense (no one murders an ancestor) but in the broader sense that the time traveler’s mucking about in the past will kill the version of him that otherwise would have been. It’s a time machine story sans the time machine, just a strange time-portal near a remote coastal village, on one side of which it’s near the turn of the 19th century and on the other it’s about a century later. As a work of counterfactual historical fiction, that time gap is important. It takes one from an age of wooden sailing ships to one of mammoth steel steamers, and a future man might know a great deal (historically and / or technologically) that could rewrite the world.

There’s another dimension to the story beyond the sci-fi time-travel. There’s a love story whose major complication is amnesia, and it’s a big enough complication that it takes the course of the story to bring the relationship into focus.

When we pic up the story, we find our protagonist, Joe, is in a hospital in Londres, the London that would exist if the French had come to rule Britain. Joe is amnesiac, and has the misfortune to learn that he is a slave. Joe will eventually receive a clue directing him to a lighthouse on the Scottish coast near the rift in time.

I enjoyed reading this novel. It’s both thought-provoking and entertaining. It has enough complication that it keeps one guessing, and keeps one reading, in an effort to bring into focus that which is chaotic and cloudy throughout most of the story. But in the end the intrigue is resolved clearly, and oh what a ride one has taken.

Best book I've read in a long time. Natasha will put you through the ringer with this book. A time travel revisionist history that claws at you as you root for the characters, then wonder if you should have, then turning everything on it's head before coming full circle with a very satisfying ending (thankfully). Although, some characters don't make it and it's so sad, but it had to happen unfortunately. I know Joe Tournier was the main character, but Missouri Kite - oh my god, the things he went through and suffered in silence are heart wrenching even though he is a 'bad guy'. I didn't want to believe it, there were little tiny signs now and then to keep the tiny spark of hope alive. And poor Joe, going through so much, with a nearly constant state of amnesia making him paranoid and flailing through this book. I figured out who he really was early on and yelled at him to remember some part of his life. And even though I figured that out, I didn't figure other things out until just before they happened. I'm not sure if that's exactly what happened or I was just hoping with my fingers crossed and tissue in hand.