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Can she escape the darkness of her past in the City of Light?
It’s 1959 and time for eighteen-year-old Sophie’s real life to start. Her existence in the village of Poynsdean, Sussex, with her austere foster-father, the Reverend Osbert Knox, and his frustrated wife Alice, is stultifying. She finds diversion and excitement in a love affair, but soon realizes that if she wants to live life on a bigger canvas she must take matters into her own hands.
She dreams of escape to Paris, the wartime home her French mother fled before her birth. Getting there will take spirit and ingenuity, but it will be her chance to discover more about her family background, and, perhaps, to find a place where she can finally belong.
When Sophie eventually arrives in the Paris arising from the ashes of the war, it’s both everything she imagined, and not at all what she expected…
'Original, page turning, wonderful. I loved it'
Katie Fforde
'A glorious read! So evocative. Conjures the excitement of Paris so vividly that the reader cannot fail to be swept along on the journey. A magical coming-of-age story. I loved it!'
Ruth Hogan
'A delightful, funny, poignant story suffused with the atmosphere of Paris on the cusp of the Sixties'
Rachel Hore
'A coming-of-age novel and so much more. Buchan weaves her narrative into a mystery that must be solved as much for the reader as for Sophie, whose story recalled, for me, the young heroines of Elizabeth Jane Howard, modern women cramped by convention, yet spirited and courageous. A wonderful, engrossing, tear-jerking and joyful read.'
Elizabeth Freemantle
'Memorable and emotionally charged ... an immersive, sensory, page-turning experience. Elizabeth Buchan is skilled at exploring moral complexities big and small, from thwarted love affairs in the Sussex countryside, to dysfunctional families, to life in Paris under Nazi occupation. She takes us through the back alleys of History, among stories that are not widely known, and brings those settings vividly to life'
Jane Thynne
