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It’s 1946, and the dust of World War Two has just begun to settle. When famous archaeologist Rufus Denby returns to London, his life and reputation are as devastated as the city around him. He’s used to the most glamorous of excavations, but can’t turn down the offer of a job in rural Sussex. It’s a refuge, and the only means left to him of scraping a living. With nothing but his satchel and a mongrel dog he’s rescued from a bomb site, he sets out to investigate an ancient church in the sleepy village of Droyton Parva.
It’s an ordinary task, but Droyton is in the hands of a most extraordinary vicar. The Reverend Archie Thorne has tasted action too, as a motorcycle-riding army chaplain, and is struggling to readjust to the little world around him. He’s a lonely man, and Rufus’s arrival soon sparks off in him a lifetime of repressed desires.
Rufus is a combat case, amnesiac and shellshocked. As he and Archie begin to unfold the archaeological mystery of Droyton, their growing friendship makes Rufus believe he might one day recapture his lost memories of the war, and find his way back from the edge of insanity to love.
It’s summer on the South Downs, the air full of sunshine and enchantment. And Rufus and Archie’s seven summer nights have just begun…
Rating: Narration – A: Content – A
Harper Fox’s Seven Summer Nights is a book that’s been recommended to me on several occasions, so when I saw it had been released in audio, I picked it up straight away as audio is my preferred method of ‘getting around to’ books I can’t find time to read in print. I admit to being a little wary given that narrator Chris Clog is not someone I’m familiar with, but it was obvious after the first few minutes of the listen that I was in very safe hands; he’s an excellent performer and I enjoyed every moment of this sixteen-plus-hours audiobook in terms of the story and the narration.
The story is a fabulous mix of romance and mystery with a touch of the supernatural thrown in for good measure that takes place around a year after the end of World War Two in a typically bucolic English village in Sussex. Well-known archaeologist Dr. Rufus Denby has been struggling to keep himself together in both body and mind since the end of the war, in which he’d served as a captain in the army and been decorated for his bravery. Haunted by terrible events he can no longer remember, Rufus is subject to sudden and uncontrollable outbursts of violence he can never recall afterwards; and he is at his first dig since the end of the war when something triggers an episode and he attacks one of his colleagues.
You can read the rest of this review at AudioGals.
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