From the heart I must confess isn’t my usual type of read but it’s one which I really enjoyed and it enlightened me to what life was like back in those days.

I have loved the opportunity to spend time researching novels to re-stockl our senior bookshelves in the school library that plays a central role in the life of the school. When I first took over the library was filled with dusty tomes that were never borrowed and languished there totally unloved.
Books like this, play a central role in ensuring that the library is stocked with fresh relevant fiction that appeals to the readers. It has a strong voice and a compelling plot that ensures that you speed through its pages, enjoying both its characterisation and dialogue whilst wanting to find out how all of its strands will be resolved by the end.
I have no hesitation in adding this to the 'must buy' list so that the senior students and staff of the school can enjoy it as much as I did. This is a gripping read that will be sure to grip its readers whether they are fans of this genre or coming to it for the first time through our now-thriving school library recommendation system. Thanks so much for allowing me to review it!

I think the spare style might be intended to convey the repressed era in which the book is set, but it resulted in From the Heart feeling underwritten. Olive is a character I didn’t wish to spend time with and I felt the subject matter has been dealt with better elsewhere (for example by Ian McEwan).

Susan Hill, no matter in what genre she is writing, and she is a very versatile author, never fails to inspire me to want to write.

She writes from the heart, so this book is aptly titled. She takes perfectly ordinary situations- friendship, love, birth, death, marriage, second marriages - and explores the emotions of them and the impact on the lives of the characters, the choices we make.

'...it occurred to her that she had a choice- now, here. She could fret about whether her father had done the right thing, marrying again, coming to this town, confining his life to a small space, and whether he would be able to grow old here in some sort of contentment- and she was right, he was not old yet, only in his early sixties. Or she could simply leave him- them- to it, let them carry on with their life as they would have done if she had not existed. Trying to discover how happy he really was, if he had regrets, was pointless because his life was not hers.'

Hill's writing makes me think of friends, of choices I have made, of relationships that have flourished and those that have failed. She makes me question if I could have done, or indeed could do, better. There is a lot of wisdom in her writing.

Don't expect conventional endings, happy ever afters; you won't get them. You will get an interesting and thought provoking read.

My favorite quote from this book- 'Books had been all to her. They saved her. ...'

Thank you to Random House UK, Vintage Publishing, Chatto and Windus for providing a digital copy of From the Heart by Susan Hill for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.

This is a novel set in the 1950s and follows the life of Olive when times are very different and single women are much more limited in their choices and the paths that they can follow.

Olive appears to be very naïve, living with her father, in a secluded sort of life and so when she meets a man and has an affair her choices are limited - although I do think she could have involved him more in the consequences

I enjoyed the book which had good insights into the time that it was written about - life was very different in those days and people had to make very different choices

My god but Susan Hill can write! This is so good - spare, understated and quietly powerful.

Olive is a young woman with a passion for literature - but with little passion for anything else. She doesn't seem to know herself; what she wants, needs and cares about are mysteries she spends this novella unravelling. She has a good brain, a healthy body, reasonable looks and a good friend but tends to drift through her life, letting things happen to her rather than deciding her own direction.

Set in 1950s England, From the Heart is written with such a detached voice that it could be off-putting - but I found Olive's discovery of her true self compelling.

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed 'The Woman in Black' many years ago, I was really intrigued to see what a different genre by Susan Hill would be like. It was completely different but equally as engaging.
'From the Heart' is a relatively short novel about Olive, a likeable character who the reader is invited to 'step into the shoes of' as we watch her grow up. The writing is third person, but feels almost as though it is first person, and we are a voyeuristic narrator following Olive's life intimately. I found this a really refreshing perspective and I think helped endear Olive to me a little more. I also really liked the somewhat brief or disjointed narrative of events. Quite a lot happens to Olive that in other narratives might be given lengthy, and sometimes unnecessary, description however, Hill dispenses with that. And I think this gives the story an added quirkiness to the book and also enhanced the feeling of being told the story by a chatty narrator.
On the whole I was more appreciative of the writing style perhaps than the actual narrative, which is nothing out of the ordinary, but it's a quick little read that I'm really glad I took the time to read.

Another reviewer called this book “slight and inconsequential” and I couldn’t agree more. I read it some weeks ago and when it came to writing my own review realised I could remember very little of it. A quick skim through brought the details back but I’m pretty sure it’s going to fade again. It’s the story of a young intelligent woman’s journey through life in the years after WWII where many restrictions still pertain but freedom of a kind is within reach. This is well trodden ground and Hill brings nothing new to the table. Olive herself isn’t a particularly memorable character and her problems and dilemmas nothing unusual. A perfectly pleasant read, but instantly forgettable.

An atmospheric and compelling little book. Short but beautifully written.

It's hard not to respond positively to the pure strength of Hill's narrative abilities. The writing is fluid, economical, compelling. But this is such a slight offering, and one that leaves so many key moments unexplored. It's hard not to register some disappointment. Hill is so good, the reader wants more.

To be published in numerous local magazines in April: A poignant coming of age novel, From the Heart is set at a time when many of the freedoms we now take for granted could cost you dearly. Olive wants to be free to follow her heart. But an unplanned pregnancy gives her an almost impossible choice – marry a man she doesn’t love, or give up her baby. Beautifully written, and painfully emotive, this is a book to devour in one evening.

From The Heart has its moments, but from a writer of Susan Hill's quality I found it rather disappointing.

This is the story of Olive, an intelligent young woman in the post war years; it is a character study which examines the effect of the attitudes of the time on her life and its subsequent development. We get accounts of restrictive views of "suitable" careers for women, sex, single parenthood, homosexuality and so on. Hill writes superbly, as always. She creates believable characters and is particularly good at conveying the recognisably subtle emotional nuances which sometimes cause Olive not to stop something she isn’t happy about, or to fail to act when she probably should, and which can have such a profound effect as a result. She is very good, too, at conveying things like the sense of starting in a new college, or joining a school for one's first teaching job.

For me, though, this wasn't quite enough. There was a sense of going over very well-trodden ground, and however well done it was, I didn't think it added much to our insight into or understanding of the age and its effect on women. I came away with the sense of having read a well-written story with a few memorable moments, but nothing much beyond that.

I'm sorry to be critical, but I think Susan Hill can do much better than this (in her brilliant Serrailler series, for example). From The Heart is certainly readable, but I can't recommend it much beyond that.

(I received an ARC from Netgalley.)

Just as I expected from Susan Hill a wonderful story beautifully crafted from start to finish. I could see, hear, taste, smell and feel everything that Olive experienced. i escaped to a more innocent era and discovered it not to be all sweetness and light but also touched too heavily with cruelty by a narrow minded and sometimes ignorant bigotry. The book was a simple story about one girl with a complex life as a result of the times she lived in.