BLOG TOUR: Beneath the Skin by Caroline England

Caroline England’s, Beneath The Skin is a tense and compelling read, exploring truth, friendships and betrayal.

No-one remembers your past. But you do.

‘Antonia, Antonia. My name is Antonia.’

It’s been her name for many years. But sometimes, like tonight, she forgets. Antonia has a secret. A secret so dark and so deep that she can barely admit it to herself. Instead, she treats herself to Friday night sessions of self-harm while her husband David is at the pub, and her best friend Sophie is drinking too much wine a few doors down.

Nobody close to her knows the truth about what the teenage Antonia saw all those years ago. No-one, that is, except her mother. But Candy is in a care home now, her mind too addled to remember the truth.

Antonia is safe. Isn’t she? The lies start small. They always do. But when the tightly woven story you’ve told yourself begins to unravel, the truth threatens to come to the surface. And then what’s going to happen?

Claire's Review ⭐⭐⭐⭐

This book was completely different to what I was expecting. I thought I would be reading a thriller but I'm not sure that I would put it in that category.

This story follows the lives of four different couples, all friends either through childhood or marriage, all with their own issues and secrets and how their actions affect each other's lives. The characters are well written and complex, and honestly not very likable but they are believable which makes up for that.

This is a slow burn story that keeps you turning the page to find out what is going to happen. Very thought provoking and makes you realise how easy it is to make assumptions about other people without knowing the truth.

Overall a very good read and a great debut. I will definitely be looking out for more of this authors work in the future.

Excerpt

Antonia holds the iPhone between her ear and her shoulder as she sweeps crumbs from the granite work surface with one hand into the other. She can tell Sophie is being very careful to enunciate her words clearly and slowly.

‘Do you want me to come over?’ she replies.

‘No, why?’

‘Because it’s a Wednesday morning and you don’t usually start this early,’ she says evenly. ‘Has something happened to upset you?’

She unties her apron and sits down. The heady smell of the baked chocolate embraces her, but she won’t be eating any. Her mother has put on a great deal of weight as she’s got older; it could be genetic and she doesn’t want to be fat.

‘It’s Sami’s fault. If he didn’t spy on me, I wouldn’t have to drink a whole bottle. I could just have a civilised glass instead of a bloody great lecture. He’s not there with you, is he?’

‘No. Why, should he be?’

‘No reason,’ Sophie responds. ‘There’s the doorbell. It’s prob­ably Christine, whoever she is. I’ll let you know later if she’s your type, Toni. Bye.’

Antonia puts down the mobile carefully. Baking cookies earlier gave her a little high. Like a wide-eyed child she watched the TV chef make them and she copied him, stage by stage, from lining the trays with parchment, to pouring the pre-measured ingredients into a mixing bowl, to spooning the mixture out and to placing them in the oven. Then the waiting. Twenty minutes. Ping!

Of course she knows how to bake just about everything one can bake, but to do it under instruction, like an obedient school child, was surprisingly satisfying. But now she’s wondering about Sophie, about what’s bothering her so much that she’s not letting on. The IVF treatment, she reasons, but then Sophie has already told her all about it, in every gory detail. Indeed, there isn’t a lot about her life that hasn’t been discussed, dissected and exam­ined by the two of them over the years. The fact that Sophie is drinking is no surprise, it’s her way of dealing with stress. But there’s something else, definitely something else.

She looks at her watch and wonders whether she should nip round to Sophie’s house to see what’s going on. It’s a twenty-mile round journey, but it’s tempting because she doesn’t like this uncertainty.

Then again, she dislikes Sophie when she’s drunk, she loathes anyone drunk, which makes her think again of David and the strange way he behaved last weekend.

‘Don’t look so bloody tragic,’ Sophie said on the Monday, putting her arms around Antonia and holding her for a few moments before pulling away and stroking her arm from shoulder to elbow in that way she always does. ‘Don’t overreact. He was only pissed. It’s not the end of the world.’

‘I know,’ she replied, thinking that perhaps it was the end of the world and feeling tense, as always, from Sophie’s touch.

‘He’s not your dad, you know, Toni.’

She flinched at Sophie’s comment, but didn’t reply. It was strange, hearing her dad mentioned twice within a week. There had been the telephone call a few days earlier, out of the blue. It was a friendly female voice, but then they’d always appeared friendly, the journalists.

‘Hi, is that Jimmy Farrell’s daughter? You’ve been difficult to track down! My name’s Zara Singh. I’m a journalist and I’m looking into—’

She’d put down the phone as though it burned.