| Synopsis: |
This is the enthralling new novel from a bestselling storyteller. May, 1919. Aged just eighteen, Alexia Erskine is preparing to attend the first debutante ball of the Season, as the guest of the Clifton family at Marley Court. For Alexia, whose impoverished parents live in a dingy Kensington basement, this is a new and somewhat alarming experience, but also an unparalleled opportunity. From her first encounter with Simon Seymour, dashing heir to the Earl of Clifton, and his rather more serious but equally handsome cousin, Roderick Davenport, Alexia is swept up into a glamorous world she hardly knew existed. As the Season progresses Alexia's relationship with Simon develops, culminating in an engagement which shocks many in the Clifton 'set', for Alexia is a nobody, whose father - an Oxford friend of Lord Clifton - gambled away his family fortune. But Alexia is young, and in love, and refuses to heed even her grandmother's words of warning. Only on their return from honeymoon does Alexia begin to realise that nothing is as it seems, and the image of a happy, aristocratic family living in contented splendour is all smoke and mirrors... |