So This is Christmas

 So This is Christmas

Reviewed By  Janet Mawdesley       August 30, 2025

 

Author  Helen Rolfe

Distributor:      Amazon
ISBN:                 978-1835611227
Publisher:         Boldwood Books Ltd
Release Date:   24 August 2025  

   Website:   https://www.amazon.com.au/So-This-Christmas-Helen-Rolfe/dp/1835611222

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So This Is Christmas is a heartwarming look at Christmas through the eyes of two firm friends living far apart who have continued their Christmas tradition of sending each other a letter every year for the past fifty years.

Greta and Bea have been friends for most of their adult lives, meeting in Vienna as young women and then through their married lives living close to each other in Britain, before Walter and Greta returned home to her beloved Vienna.

Now both elderly ladies, Sophie, a care assistant at Tapestry Lodge writes and posts Bea’s letters and reads Greta’s to her. They have all become firm friends over the past four years.

Sadly, Bea passes just before Christmas and Sophie discovers she has been left a bequest by Bea, with the instructions to visit Vienna at Christmas. After a series of disastrous events Sophie decides to go and spend the Christmas season in Vienna and explore all the many wonderful things she has been told about by Bea and Greta.

As Sophie relaxes into enjoying Vienna, meets up with the delightful Walter, Greta’s husband, their son Nick and adopted daughter Jennie she begins to feel that finally she has found a family who understand family; something she has always wanted but never had.

But things do not go according to plan as Sophie’s past is on a direct collision with Jennies and when it is revelled to them both in the most horrific manner, she is devastated, fleeing back England heartbroken and shattered.

Can life ever change for her is the question she asks herself as she mourns the loss of a new love, a budding family and faces a bleak future. She realises she has to decide as to how she wants to lead her life and once this is done, she feels considerably better.

But the season of good will and glad tidings is not finished with her as she finally has to accept that understanding is healing and the future is bright with the man you love and who loves you.

Fiction, General