The Austen Escape by Katherine Reay

This was a definite twist and variation on a variation of the Austen reads.

Isabel persuades or rather manipulates her friend Mary to join her in an Austen reinvention stay in England, all expenses paid.  Isabel's dissertation is on Austen and to complete this she feels that this stay is necessary. Mary is an engineer, very clear cut in her views and ideas and thinks logically. This is really not her scene but she needs to get away from a unpleasant work scenario and her father too thinks this would be the ideal break. Two weeks is not the end of the world.

Everything goes on smoothly with the Regency clothes, the enactments, the food, the service at the inn. Until Isabel loses her memory, goes into a fugue state and forgets her entire past and actually begins to think that she is living at the time of Austen with the same mores and rules that apply then. Mary is on her own to deal with the situation and deal with it she along with the other participants do.

The complication and distrust set in when Mary half way through discovers betrayal by a friend who has been close to her and her family from the time they were tots and the work scenario becomes very much personal and in Mary's face.

The story was beguiling and interesting and different and totally different to what I've read before on JA variations!

Sent to me by Netgalley for an unbiased review, courtesy of Thomas Nelson FICTION.