Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

I’m just going to say it: Yesteryear is the best book I have read all year.

I read this one on a much-needed holiday, and I’m actually glad I did because I needed my brain to be free to properly enjoy it.

Sometimes I can read when work is busy and my mind is full of a hundred different things. This isn’t one of those books. Yesteryear deserved my attention, and once it had it, I genuinely couldn’t put it down.

Written by Caro Claire Burke, Yesteryear introduces us to Natalie Heller Mills, a hugely successful traditional-lifestyle influencer who appears to have created the perfect life. She has the beautiful farmhouse, handsome husband, six children and millions of followers watching her carefully curated world of homemade food, family life and traditional values. Except, unsurprisingly, social media isn’t showing the whole story.

Then you get past the opening of the book and everything changes. I won’t tell you how. I actually think you should go into this book knowing as little as possible because part of the enjoyment for me was experiencing that moment when I suddenly realised this was not going to be the book I thought I was reading.

It shocked me at first. And then I absolutely loved it. From that point onwards, I was hooked.

It’s entertaining – but there’s a lot underneath it

What I particularly enjoyed about Yesteryear is that beneath a genuinely gripping story there are some fascinating questions about modern life.

How much of what we see online is real? How easy is it to romanticise a way of life when you don’t actually have to experience its difficult parts? And how much pressure do women still face to perform a particular version of being a good wife, good mother or successful woman?

Natalie’s public life looks effortless, but we’re quickly shown just how much work goes into creating that image. That’s something I think feels incredibly relevant now.

We see tiny snapshots of people’s lives online and compare them with the entirety of our own. We see beautiful homes without seeing the mess outside the photograph, successful businesses without seeing the difficult months, and seemingly perfect families without knowing what happens when the camera is switched off.

Yesteryear takes that idea somewhere much darker, and much more entertaining. There were moments when it made me laugh, moments when it made me uncomfortable and plenty of moments when I simply needed to know what happened next.

That’s exactly what I want from fiction.

Why I’m recommending it to the Daily Round community

Not every book we recommend has to teach us how to be more productive, improve our wellbeing or become a better leader. Sometimes reading itself is the wellbeing activity.

People working in health and social care spend their working lives thinking about other people. Add families, relationships, bills, housework and everything else life throws at us, and finding something that completely takes your mind somewhere else can be incredibly valuable.

That’s what this book did for me. For a few hours, my brain wasn’t thinking about work. It was in Natalie’s world. And sometimes that’s exactly what a good book should do.

My verdict

★★★★★ 5 out of 5 stars.

Without question, my favourite book of the year so far. It’s clever, dark, funny, uncomfortable and completely addictive. There is a major change very early in the story that initially took me by surprise, but once I went with it, I couldn’t put the book down.

I finished it thinking one thing:

They HAVE to make this into a movie.

And apparently somebody agrees with me, because Yesteryear is already being adapted for film, with Anne Hathaway set to star as Natalie. Now that’s one I’ll be watching.

If you’re heading on holiday, have a few days off or simply want a book capable of making you forget about everything else for a while, take Yesteryear with you.

Just don’t blame me when you don’t want to put it down.