Soon to be featured on Zoe Ball's Radio 2 Book Club.
'Exquisite' - Will Dean, author of Dark Pines
'This is a book that will stay with you' - Ann Cleeves, bestselling author of the Vera series
'Compelling, twisty and wonderfully suspenseful' - Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground
Six years after the end of the Great War, a nation is still in mourning. Thousands of husbands, fathers, sons and sweethearts were lost in Europe; millions more came back wounded and permanently damaged.
Beatrice Cade is an orphan, unmarried and childless - and given the dearth of men, likely to remain that way. London is full of women like her: not wives, not widows, not mothers. There is no name for these invisible women, and no place for their grief. Determined to carve out a richer and more fulfilling way to live as a single woman, Bea takes a room in a Bloomsbury ladies' club and a job in the City. Then a fleeting encounter changes everything. Bea's emerging independence is destroyed when she falls in love for the first time.
Kate Ryan is an ordinary wife and mother who has managed to build an enviable life with her handsome husband and her daughter. To anyone looking in from the outside, they seem like a normal, happy family - until two policemen knock on her door one morning and threaten to destroy the facade Kate has created. Suddenly, two women who never should have met are connected for ever . . .
Mesmerising, haunting and utterly remarkable, this is a devastating story of fantasy, obsession inspired by a murder that took place almost a hundred years ago.