Wow - moving, dark, twisty, funny, heartbreaking…what more can I say?

I loved this book, the different timelines helped develop characters more than I can explain! I was so emotionally invested in the ending. Recommended!

3 stars for this.

The plot of the old manor explored in childhood reminded me a lot of The Poison Tree but I didn’t connect with the characters as much in this one. I struggled at first to differentiate all the characters and I found there were too many plots going on and by the end I was quite confused!

I preferred the current day plot to the childhood plot and I found when I did long stretches of reading this in one go I got quite into it, but I found myself not excited to pick it up or engaged in the plot at all. I newly gave up at 50% but decided to keep going as I’d made it that far.

I’ve come away with it thinking I maybe just didn’t get it and perhaps I wasn’t in the right headspace but I found this quite hard to connect and engage with, but when I did there was stuff I did like but not enough to be memorable.

This was a difficult one for me, wanted to like it so much. Unfortunately not to my taste, too slow and laborious. Will have a break and then give it another go.

This is a solid debut by Victoria Gosling and I can't wait to read more of her work. The story itself was gripping and the character development throughout it was really great. While there were a few elements of the story that didn't have satisfying conclusions to me personally, this book was still enjoyable and the conclusions may be really satisfying for others.

Thank you to Net Galley and Serpent's Tail for the ARC!

I wanted to like this but the writing style just wasn’t for me. The book is very slow paced and the story felt very disjointed to me. I also feel like ending was a bit out of nowhere and had little connection to the rest of the story.

There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

Before the Ruins is set around Andy, a woman living in London who is from Wiltshire. At the start of the book Andy is contacted by an old school friend's mother, telling her that she thinks Peter is missing.

Andy is in sporadic contact with Peter, but realises that events of their teen years have pushed them apart and actually she knows very little about him.

Andy begins to try and find Peter, and this sends her off into their shared past, as she believes the reason Peter is missing lies in the magical summer at the end of A Levels, when they were teenagers with no responsibilities and waiting for the exam results that will determine their futures.

Andy is not particularly likeable, and though she is motivated to try and find Peter, her reasons for doing so are because she is convinced she had something to do with it and feels guilty. An unlikeable female protaganist always gets my vote.

The book moves easily between the current day and Andy's memories of the past. Andy is described by those around her as "rude and appalling" but as the book unfolds becomes clear that she is repressing a lot of her own trauma.

I enjoyed the book and think it would make a great summer read.

A stunning, absorbing debut novel. I was glued to this - couldn't put it down, and raced through it because I loved the characters and couldn't wait to find out what happened. Gosling gets atmosphere and characterization absolutely right. Can't wait to start recommending this to people!

This book was well written reflecting the effects of past into present. I liked the plot a lot and found it very gripping. Sometimes a bit dark, but all the more well written. Worth a read.

Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

Memory is a house, a castle with many rooms. Some of the rooms are deeper inside, honeycombed away. Each has a thousand keys – an image, a smell, a sound. Behind each door are a thousand other doors.

Victoria Gosling’s debut novel Before the Ruins is based on a common literary trope – that of a narrator who revisits formative events experienced by a younger, less experienced self. In this case, the story is told by thirty-eight-year-old Andrea, known to her old friends as Andy, now working in London as a compliance officer for an investment fund. What triggers her exercise in retrospection is the sudden disappearance of Peter, a close childhood companion and the son of the vicar of the village where Andy grew up. This mystery evokes memories of the golden summer of 1996. In search of adventure after their final exams, Peter, her boyfriend Marcus and their friend Em had broken into a local abandoned manor and befriended David, a young man their age who was living there in hiding after an ill-advised card theft. Inspired by the story of the theft of a diamond necklace fifty years earlier and the subsequent sudden death of a potential suspect, the five play treasure hunts with a replica necklace, secretly hoping to find the real thing.

A crumbling stately home, hidden jewels, nostalgic accounts of summer holidays… the novel’s initial chapters feel like a grown-up version of the Famous Five – not unlike "Secret Passages in a Hillside Town" by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, without the latter’s crazy weirdness.

However, this description doesn’t really do justice to what turns out to be a narratively complex work. The novels juggles three timelines – the present, 1996 (with an ‘epilogue’ which happens three years later) and, to a lesser extent, 1936. I read somewhere that the book’s working title was The Mysteries. Before the Ruins sounds more poetic, with its punning play on the meaning of “before”, simultaneously suggesting an account of what led to the narrator’s “apocalypse” (i.e. before as “prior”) and a spectator surveying the results of a tragic collapse (i.e. before as “in front of”).

Yet, “The Mysteries” goes straight to the heart of the novel. Because this is indeed a book based on mysteries – not just the location of the missing jewels (harkening to the plots of Enid Blyton and classic “cozy” detective novels) but also, and more importantly, the secrets which the characters, despite being close friends, are constantly hiding; the lies they tell each other and, sometimes, themselves; the domestic tragedies and abuse lived in silence between four walls. In a meta-twist, the novel becomes at once a mystery novel and a novel about mysteries. Significantly, towards the end, after watching an episode of a detective novel on TV, Andrea ruminates about

how different the programme was from life. How life was full of mysteries that would not be solved, not ever, while we lived. But that each of us would play the detective nonetheless, and the life and death we would investigate, whether we knew it or not, was our own, and the thing was not to become deadened to them, to the mysteries

Admittedly, as the “mysteries” pile up, we as readers are increasingly expected to suspend our disbelief. Just like during an airing of The Midsomer Murders one starts to wonder whether the levels of intrigue in a Wiltshire village might not be statistically skewed… Frankly, I did not mind this at all. I could not care less about the improbability of certain plot twists and just read on, immersed and, more often than not, moved. What I liked best about Before the Ruins is how the novel’s several storylines are presented within the structure of a coming-of-age narrative, one whose aching nostalgia reminded me at times of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (referenced in the title of one of the final chapters). Perhaps it helped that, like the narrator, I also came of age in the nineties – and whilst I wasn’t dropping Es or carousing in abandoned manors in the English countryside, I still lovingly remember that decade. Or perhaps the novel touched deeper, speaking to the little boy curled up on a sofa reading The Famous Five.

This is a difficult book to rate.
The concept is good and the writing is almost poetically good, particularly at the beginning.... but I just couldn’t gel with it.
It felt thready and confusing at time’s, and I often felt like i had to really concentrate to remember what was going on and what era we were in.
I wanted to love it because a lot of it was very relatable, but I can’t give it more than 2.5 stars 🌟

A good story about how the past reflects in our present. A sweet and intelligent story. Really enjoyed this. Scary at parts too! X

This is nicely written but it feels a little shapeless as if the author changed direction at some point. The structure of looking back to a teenage summer feels over-familiar, and the characterisation can be a bit thin. All the same, there's an energy in the writing that has potential. Good as an upmarket holiday read.