Kirsty Wark is known as a presenter on radio and television and The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle was her first novel. I chose it for my 60 Books from 60 Years challenge because I liked the sound of the plot.
Elizabeth Pringle was an elderly woman living on the Scottish island of Arran. She had lived there all her life and died unmarried. In her will she left her house and possessions to a woman who had once knocked on her door many years before and asked her to sell the house to her if she wanted to move. Martha is the daughter of the beneficiary of the will who comes to the island to try to sort out what has happened because her mother now has dementia.
There are a number of plot strands to this book and the author tells some of it as a diary left by Elizabeth explaining her life and the decision she made. Martha has a difficult relationship with her sister, has recently left a partnership, isn’t sure about her job and is managing the care of her declining mother. She doesn’t understand why Elizabeth has gifted her house to her mother and in an effort to find out why she makes contact with the two men who knew Elizabeth best in her later days – a landscape gardener and a Buddhist monk.
I did think that the idea for this book was interesting but there isn’t actually a lot to the story. The sections of Elizabeth’s diary are interesting but predictable and the rest is a bit slow. The reasoning behind Elizabeth’s legacy didn’t live up to my expectations when it is finally revealed. This isn’t really an historical novel and nor is it a mystery, although there are elements of both within it. I feel that in other hands the story might have been more engaging.
There is nothing wrong with the book and the descriptions of landscape and the island are particularly well done but, on the whole, it didn’t grip me and I failed to care about the characters by the end.
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