Customer Reviews

Sibyl's Cave

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In 'Sibyl's Cave', Padmore has created a stunning piece of realist fiction. The author's eye for detail brings her characters and settings to life in a vivid and completely convincing way. This is a totally immersive, rich and delicious reading experience. A beautiful, beautiful book.

I couldn't put this book down because I really wanted to know what happened to the characters and understand them better. It is delightful to read a book which draws a whole interwoven web of characters so well. The protagonist, in her various phases, is intriguing, but so are those Padmore has written around her. It was the interplay of characters and their impact on Billie, which made this book so fascinating. It was in no way predictable. More and more depth was revealed, yet internal consistency was never lost.

I highly recommend this book if you want to read a good story, beautifully written, which offers so much more than that because of the exploration of the impact others have on our lives and the way we live them.

In realist and non-genre fiction so often a first book is so imbued by the author's personality the narrative is obscured. In Padmore's work she skilfully removes any sign of autobiography and ensures that the reader is given a clear path to the characters - charting that path with remarkably rich and true description. It is her ability to create a lush and textured external landscape for the characters - whether it be the sun-drenched Italian islands, the greyness of England in the 40s or an aromatic and sensual Australian island - that invokes powerfully the characters' internal environment.

Each island that the protagonist Billie lands upon resonates with a part of herself. And it is these changing selves that Padmore explores with a sense of empathy and veracity that makes the book an extraordinary representation of character and place.

An added layer to the truthful tone of the novel is a more fantastic atmosphere imbued with ancient myth. The tales of the Sibyl and Dido overlay the story and resonate in a real and passionate way within the narrative. Padmore's obvious scholarship and erudition does not intrude on the story but rather creates a timeless substance for which the stories of our lives can be seen as tales of wonder.

'Sibyl's Cave' is a refreshing and beautifully written book that gives the reader a strong sense of intimacy with the characters and an authentic involvement with the story, and a sense of the worth of our own stories.