The Sky Beneath Us by Fiona Valpy

Dear friends. Today I bring you a book I found truly magical. How I wish I had a Sherpa family, like the heroines of this book!

I'm thrilled to be on the blog tour for The Sky Beneath Us by Fiona Valpy.

Genres: historical fiction, women's fiction.

Publisher's Description

1927. Violet Mackenzie-Grant is embarking on her dream of studying at the Edinburgh School of Gardening for Women. She doesn’t yet know that it’s a journey that will take her to Kathmandu and beyond, deep into captivating landscapes and cultures that are worlds away from everything and everyone she’s left behind in Scotland.

2020. Daisy Laverock has dreamed of retracing the footsteps of her great-great-aunt Violet ever since discovering her long-lost journals, whose accounts of plant hunting in the 1930s inspired Daisy’s own career. Divorced, and facing an empty nest, Daisy decides to embark on the trip of a lifetime. She arrives in Nepal, ready to start trekking in the shadow of Everest. But fate, and the pandemic, have other plans.

Stranded and alone, Daisy must fall back on the kindness of strangers, taking inspiration from Violet’s determination and resilience to keep going in the darkest of times. As she gradually pieces together the fragments of Violet’s story and uncovers long-held secrets, can Daisy finally reveal a path forward to her own future?

My Thoughts

Have you ever wondered "where were all the female explorers?" As we learn in this book, they were there, accompanying their husbands on the expeditions to find new botanical species, often in some countries that were challenging to explore.

In a dual timeline we first visit Nepal in the 1920s with botanical illustrator Violet. She's based on real female characters from that period. Violet is in a predicament and goes in search of her husband Callum, who's on a botanical expedition.

Violet ends up on the expedition herself, helping to identify and paint specimens. It's gruelling work with hours of trekking and sleeping in tents, sometimes bitterly cold.

Fast forward a few decades and a relative of Violet's, Daisy, is travelling to Nepal to follow in Violet's footsteps, having read her journal. Daisy is a bit lost. She's divorced, didn't have the career she envisaged, and feels dissatisfied.

Daisy is shocked- and delighted - to find a rich seam of Sherpa relatives as she makes her way to Phortse. They make her welcome when Covid strikes and the pandemic means she can't leave Nepal. It was the same for Violet when she had nowhere else to go. The Gherkas offered her warmth and hospitality.

I loved the rich descriptions, particularly the secret Valley of Flowers. I could almost smell the fragrance and see the wonderful blue of Meconopsis Horribla, "discovered" by Violet, which really does exist.

I enjoyed learning about the Sherpa way of life, its simplicity and focus, and about the devoutness of the people. I was already cynical about the industry of exploitation that has developed around Everest. While the Sherpas are very agile, determined and fully capable of escorting unfit tourists to the top of their goddess's head, they do so at enormous personal cost.

Global warming is also having an impact in the Himalayas, and the weather has become more erratic. In the book Daisy goes back with her daughters to help the people of Phortse build glasshouses. It's thrilling to learn that this work really is happening, and Fiona Valpy, at the end of the book, describes how she went there.

I became so invested in Daisy and Violet, and their wonderful Sherpa family. It's great to know that Daisy and her parents feature in an earlier book, The Swallow Sings.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fiona Valpy is an acclaimed bestselling author, with three million readers world-wide. Her novels have held the number 1 position on the Amazon Kindle charts in the USA, UK and Australia, and been listed as Washington Post and Wall Street Journal bestsellers. Translation rights have been sold in 30 countries for more than 70 foreign language editions.

Fiona is a patron of the Birnam Book Festival, Innerpeffray Library, The Teapot Trust and The Little Sherpa Foundation. Through donations from royalties, she’s raised £12,000 (and counting) for the global charity Médecins Sans Frontières and The Little Sherpa Foundation. When not writing, she enjoys daily dips in the River Tay and walking in the hills around her home in Dunkeld.

I hope you have enjoyed my spotlight on The Sky Beneath Us, a very memorable and well written book that would be excellent for book clubs.

Thanks to Anne Cater from Random Things Tours, the author and Lake Union Publishing for the advance digital copy in return for an honest review. The book is published on 10 September

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