Towards the end of last year I wrote about books I was looking forward to reading this year. Kit de Waal's new book, The Trick to Time, was among them. I loved her previous book, My Name is Leon, but I absolutely adored reading this wonderful book.

"One day, you will want these hours back, my girl. You will wonder how you lost them and you will want to get them back. There's a trick to time. You can make it expand or you can make it contract. Make it shorter or make it longer."

Mona is approaching her 60th birthday and is a dollmaker. She lives a solitary life with only a few friends. She works with a carpenter who makes the dolls, to very exact specifications, while she creates their clothes and paints their features. Many of the dolls she makes have a hidden meaning known only to the people who buy them. Mona arrived from Ireland as a young girl, so excited to be living in Birmingham and with a new job. When she meets William at a dance, it is love between them almost instantly and they soon marry. A tragedy tears them apart and woven through the chapters of this book, Mona looks back at significant moments in her own life and their life together.

In Mona, Kit de Waal has created a character I think many women will be able to empathise with. She has known hardship, has known joy and has known great sorrow and loss. The subject matter may be very close to home for some women and for that reason might be difficult to read as it could evoke painful memories. It was at times hard to read as I knew that something terribly sad was going to happen. Yet, Kit de Waal has written with such insight and sensitivity that the book is never overly emotional but instead is moving and powerful.

Although Mona is the main focus of the book, it would not be right to review this without mentioning just some of the other characters who add so much to the story. In particular, William's aunts Teresa and Margaret, (who he dubbed Pestilence and Famine!) proved to be a true support to Mona in her time of need, as did Bridie a family friend. The compassionate Nurse Archer showed much emotional intelligence at a time when women who had experienced loss were just supposed to get on with things. 

The Trick to Time is a beautifully written, powerful and poignant account of loss and grief yet above all an account of enduring love. Without doubt, this will be one of my Top Reads at the end of this year.

A story of love and loss but I found it quite confusing how it jumped from then and now

Following the huge success of her first novel, My Name is Leon (described by the Guardian as a "touching, thought-provoking debut") Kit de Waal's new novel The Trick to Time is even more ambitious. And already long-listed for the Women's Fiction Prize. For anyone honing their craft, it's also an object lesson in that tired trope of creative writing classes: 'show don't tell'.
This time her narrator is not a young boy, but a middle-aged woman. Mona (short for Desdemona) is from Ireland and lives a quiet, lonely life in a seaside town in England where a carpenter makes the dolls that she dresses (upcycling charity shop clothes) to sell in her own shop.
'She can look at a silk blouse with a satin cuff and see what it might turn into, which doll might wear it and how she might take it apart.'
Now approaching her 60th birthday, Mona has complex memories and very mixed feelings. Her mother died when she was a child so she was brought up by her father. The image of the young girl playing on the beach in Ireland while her mother is ill in bed is only one of many memorable images in this heart-breaking novel:
'Sand as soft as powder all around the wide curve of the bay. She splashes and plays and gets her sandals wet and stays away for hours... at seven or eight children can be heartless.'
In a richly evocative and subtly nuanced story about the aftermath of terrible and ordinary losses: parents, a husband, a baby, the trick to time of the title is the secret shared between the young Mona and her father, and establishes time and memory, and what we can do with our memories as the main themes of this novel.
'You can make it expand or you can make it contract. Make it shorter or make it longer,' he says... 'By the sea all life's worries wash away.'
Like Leon, in Kit de Waal's first novel, Mona is a delightful character, a loyal friend and popular with the few people she knows well; and throughout the novel the reader is rooting for her: we don't want any more tragedy in a life already full of loss.
Revelations about the insensitive treatment of stillbirths in the 1970s are shocking, but also provide an opportunity for the act of kindness that sets Mona off on her quest to help other parents deal with the grief of losing a baby. As well as managing her business, she runs an unconventional counselling service where parents can work through their own grief. But, at 59 Mona herself still hasn't come to terms with her own loss. Kit de Waal is a talented and very canny writer: she sets up a range of possible futures for the lovely but lonely Mona. Half-way through the novel I made a note of my predictions and sat back to see if I was right. Would Mona go to Paris or stay in England? Would she marry the carpenter or the gent? Most proved to be wrong. Like opening doors along a corridor the writer keeps raising possible futures then, just when you think it's inevitable, she bangs them shut. And Mona keeps walking.
Kit de Waal plays on our deepest fears with an expert touch. In less expert hands The Trick to Time could easily have sunk to melodrama: she steers a fine line between sentimentality and genuine emotion but stays on the right side. The determining factor is the generosity of spirit and remarkable sense of humour that come through every chapter. This book often brought me to tears - both at the poignancy of Mona's story and at the absurdity of some of the scenes. The chapter with the hairnet (which I won't spoil for you) must be the darkest and funniest of the whole novel.
The Trick to Time is an exquisitely written book dealing with real human feelings. There are no stereotypical drunken abusive Irish fathers or dodgy priests; Mona is the voice of many ordinary, working class women who reach middle age but still have an important story that should be told. And listened to.

An achingly beautiful love story of loss and the twists and turns of life.

Unusual story jumps about between different time periods as Mona looks back on her sad life with William, her one true love interwoven with her current life creating beautiful wooden dolls which she uses to help women come to terms with loss. Enjoyable story with some good characterisation marred for me by her new friend Karl who I didn’t find at all believable and a slight uneasiness at the way she used the dolls to help the women. The end is lovely but I did see it coming.

The first 30/40% of this book i found quite hard going. It didn't grip me and I was confused at times with the jumping between past and present day .
Once I got settled in to the book i loved it. It's a story of love and loss and getting on and making the most of life. Mona is lonely and hasn't had the best life but uses her imagination and the trick of time to go back, fill in the gaps and finally live the life she would have wished for herself. A very thought provoking story that often pulls at the heart strings

The Trick to Time' is a beautiful story told slowly and meaningfully. It is a story of loss, and is therefore a sad read, but compelling. I would recommend it.

Loved it. Heroine is( for a change) my age group. Evotive,engaging, the back story unravels to reveal the complex injured, Mona of the present day. I identified with the locations as I live in Birmingham,making the read more realistic. One of my fave raves. Kit Dr Waal is on my authors to watch out for.

Mona is a doll-maker. She crafts beautiful, handmade wooden dolls in her workshop in a sleepy seaside town. Every doll is special. Every doll has a name. And every doll has a hidden meaning, from a past Mona has never accepted.
Each new doll takes Mona back to a different time entirely - back to Birmingham, in 1972. Back to the thrill of being a young Irish girl in a big city, with a new job and a room of her own in a busy boarding house. Back to her first night out in town, where she meets William, a gentle Irish boy with an easy smile and an open face. Back to their whirlwind marriage, and unexpected pregnancy. And finally, to the tragedy that tore them apart.

This is the perfect second novel. De Waal has managed to keep up the tremendous bar that was set with My Name is Leon.
Just to warn you - this story will break your heart! It is incredibly moving and so brutal about how unfair life is, that I challenge anyone not to resonate with it.
The Trick to Time show cases marginalised individuals from groups of race, class gender and more; and how society has treated them. Mona is Irish and as such is treated with disdain and distrust from the majority of the people in Birmingham that it shocks and saddens you, but this is what it was like for many people.
The writing style is this book is almost dream like when in the present tense, I found myself being very lightly swept up in the story and a yearning to know what happened to Mona when you meet her just before her 60th birthday.
I cannot urge you enough to read this beautiful book.

This is a novel that makes you think and it packs a lot of feeling and depth of emotion into less than three hundred pages.

We meet Mona, in her present situation, coming up to sixty years old and living alone in a seaside town and creating and decorating special wooden dolls for her shop with the help of a local carpenter, each doll with a significance, and we meet Mona in the past, as a little girl in Ireland and then as a young woman in Birmingham in 1972, just starting to make her way in the world, and falling in love with young Irishman William, marrying and falling pregnant, and the tragedy that ensues. The threads of Mona's life are intermingled throughout the narrative, taking us back and forth, moments from the past becoming memories and reflections in the present, with the most heartbreaking moment of all becoming a memory that has been too hard to confront.

In The Trick to Time, Kit de Waal writes of many things, of falling in love and the joy and happiness it can bring, of loneliness and terrible sadness and immense loss, grief that lasts a lifetime, of mental health and the hidden, mostly invisible nature of this pain, of leaving home and the connections to where we come from, memories that haunt us, the excitement yet also the anxiety and doubt surrounding the forging of new relationships whilst still feeling the bonds and pull of the past strongly.
How, when there is one thing above all else in the world that hurts us to think about or see, that is so often the only thing we can seem to see and notice in the world around us.

Such a moving tale, I felt such sadness for Mona and for William, for what happened in their young lives. Sometimes I felt I wanted to be drawn closer to some of the characters surrounding Mona, but this is very much her life and her story. I feel I preferred My Name is Leon to this novel overall but admired qualities in the writing of both.

Two passages that I liked in particular:

...'one day, you will want these hours back, my girl. You will wonder how you lost them and you will want to get them back. There's a trick to time.'

Everything is beautiful from a distance, even our memories. Even the memories that were not once so good can be appreciated over time, don't you think?'

The Trick to Time is a love story, which I enjoyed even though it's not my favourite genre. I preferred Kit de Waals first book, My name is Leon. The writing is beautiful and that's what kept me reading. Kit de Waal certainly has a way with words.

A moving and well written book about 60 year old Mona, who hasn't had an easy life. Along the way she has suffered a lot of heartache and loss. A long with a local carpenter they create dolls made out of wood; Mona sells them online and in her shop.
But their real speciality are making dolls that help families who've a lost child through miscarriages or those born a sleep. The dolls weigh the same as the lost child.
It's such a moving and heartfelt story which flits through the decades from Ireland to England.

Such a simple, thought-provoking book.
Mona is turning 60 and looking back over her life.
A life that has its fair share of heartbreak.
This book covers a subject that can't be easy to write about and it's certainly not easy to read about but the author has done so with such sensitivity.

Having said that, this book wasn't for me. The way that it jumped from present day to the time that Mona is remembering was just a little too chaotic for me as it just didn't seem to give you any idea of what you were reading about.

Kit de Waal can certainly create credible characters even when they populate a narrative which has a fairy tale quality to it. In ‘The Trick to Time’, the longsuffering, delightful Mona has her more than her fair share of tragedy to contend with. Death and lunacy have cast a shadow on her life and, as she celebrates her sixtieth birthday in the small seaside town where she makes her exquisite life size dolls, we gradually learn about the past experiences that have made her the resilient, kind, sad woman that she is. Whilst the character of Karl, Mona’s new neighbour and would-be suitor, appears fey and mildly irritating throughout the novel, Kit de Waal reveals why he behaves as he does in the final chapters. Nevertheless, whilst we may feel some sympathy for his situation, the revelation does not make him any more likeable. He is a very effective foil for Mona; she remains true to her sense of who she is and what she believes in all that she does. He does not even seem to understand what this concept means.
The story leads us from rural Ireland to Birmingham in the early 70s where Mona meets and marries William, a charismatic boy from Galway. However, after the infamous IRA pub bombing, life becomes very difficult indeed for the couple. Kit de Waal uses narrative gaps carefully; certain aspects of Mona’s life are not described in any detail and, whilst some readers might see this as a weakness, what is not said allows the reader to imagine the complete loss that Mona suffers. And yet this novel is ultimately about redemption rather than loss. Over the years Mona learns to use her tragedy to help others and the unexpected and surprising ending seems an apt reward for someone who has endured so much.
Throughout the novel Kit de Waal plays with time. Mona’s childhood merges with early marriage scenes and then seamlessly flows into the present. Some readers may find this irritating or confusing. Nevertheless, this structure is key to the success of the novel. It reminds us that we are influenced and shaped by all that has happened to us. Our experiences over time shape us just as the enigmatic woodcarver shapes Mona’s beautiful dolls.

'The Trick to Time' is a story full of loss and love. The pace is slow, and it did take me a while to get immersed in the story, but it is a skilled and deliberate pace written in a very measured way which makes the book almost soothing in its gentleness.

SLIGHT SPOILERS
The plot was charming; but don't expect a happy ending to this subtle and touching narrative. I did have trouble processing that there was no redemption, but then some stories don't have a happy ending and it would have seemed forced if that had been the case.

First to say I truly loved My Name is Leon by this author and so was very excited to be reading her newest novel. And I am so sad that I just didn’t find the same degree of satisfaction this time. To me the characters seemed relatively wooden and two dimensional and the structure disjointed. I know many reviewers were blown away by Mona and her dolls and so I don’t want to say too much, just that it wasn’t for me.

A different book to what I normally read but thoroughly enjoyed it a lovely story beautifully told loved Mona's journey and keeps you wanting more for her despite her troubles she finds a way to cope lovely ending which I didn't guess until quite neer the end a good read

Kit De Waal’s first novel My name is Leon, was in my top ten reads in 2016 so I was looking forward to reading this book.
This a beautiful book about love and loss, coping and growing old.
4 stars

Mona falls deeply in love with William but will their love survive? Really well written, kept me engrossed wondering if Mona would be able to find love again. Unexpected twist in the final chapters .

This is a beautifully written book but so sad.

Mona is Irish living in Birmingham with a new job. She meets William and they fall in love and have their lives mapped out in front of them. Mona falls pregnant and they look forward to the birth. However, on the day of the birth events overtake them to change their lives forever. Mona takes comfort from dressing individual dolls in hand made clothes which she sells all over the world . The wooden dolls are made by her carpenter friend who lives nearby. When she turns 60 Mona looks back on her life and loves.
A love that lasts forever despite the challenges that life throws at them.