What is the truth about Valentine Siddons, acclaimed poet and World War 1 hero? When her researcher and his notes mysteriously disappear, Elsa Meyers, who is developing a film about the poet’s life, is forced to conduct her own investigation into his past. It is a search which leads to a relationship with his grandson, Dr Oliver Eastway, celebrated academic and Siddons’s biographer, and ultimately forces Elsa to face her own conflict of loyalties.
Reviews
An intelligent and satisfying read, knitting past and present with a poignant, resonant heart.
Rosie Thomas
A thoughtful and effortlessly engaging double narrative combining elements of Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong and A.S Byatt’s Possession to give us a version of the Great War that is aimed fair and square at the women’s market.
Observer
Excellently researched and movingly told. A thoughtful and powerful account of a war which still casts a shadow today.
Independent
A haunting paradox explored with grace and intelligence.
Elizabeth Buchan, The Times
An enjoyable literary mystery which shifts between London both in the present day and in the years leading to the First World War.
Sunday Times
Past and present are elegantly inter woven, period detail is impressive as if the ambition of the theme.
Harpers & Queen
ane Thynne’s first novel captures beautifully the atmosphere of the period’s literary gatherings, steamy salons and decadent house parties. Even more impressive is her evocation of the horrors of that war, the realities of the slaughter and the wilful unawareness of those left back home.
Good Housekeeping