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Sunday 3 October 2010

IMMORTAL BELOVED by Cate Tiernan


New name, new town, new life. Nastasya has done it too often to count. And there s no end in sight. Nothing ever really ends . . . when you re immortal. But now, after centuries of feeding from the lives of the innocents around her, of living with little care for others, Nastasya is ready to turn towards the light.

After some of the events I ve witnessed I felt like I was a shell with nothing alive left in me.

I hadn t been going around killing people, but people were hurt the memories just kept trickling in like rivulets of fresh acid dripping into my brain until I wanted to scream. It was in my blood, I knew.

A darkness.
The darkness.

I had inherited it, along with my immortality and my black eyes.

Nastasya is an immortal. She's currently living in London with a bunch of immortals who like to party and drink their days away. This suits her fine, because it helps keep her emotional side dormant. She's had a lot of fun with her friends, but the night one of them hurts a person by using magic, she starts to question the way she's living her life.

Being so old and having survived through so many different lifetimes has given Nastasya an edge of experience that no one suspects because she still looks so young. But there are a lot of suppressed memories that slowly filter out into her current life when she decides to flee London and instead makes her way towards Boston. She's looking for a woman called River, someone she met only briefly eighty years ago, but made an impact on her.

When she finds her, Nastasya finds herself living in a secluded farm where immortals go to rehabilitate themselves, re-evaluate their lives, and realise what they have/want to do next. Here she does a bunch of chores everyday, learns meditation, gets a human job, and slowly starts to realise some hard truths about herself that she's never bothered to focus on, or has chosen to ignore.

This is also where she meets Reyn, the guy who looks like a Viking and seems to hate her. He's also familiar, though she can't remember why, at first. And when the truth comes out about him, her life is changed forever. 

Immortal Beloved was an exciting story told through the eyes of an old soul who's been through several human lifetimes, yet manages to keep a modern appeal to her outlook and voice. There's a little bit of everything--intrigue, mystery, a puzzle to solve, an interesting cast of characters, and even a dash of romance. And all the time, I could feel something dark lurking in the background, which added tension. 

Immortal Beloved, October 2010, ISBN 9781444707052, H&S Fiction

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