Simon plans to transform the shy and conservative governess Rachel into a fashionable Bright Young Thing, fitting into the hedonistic scene of interwar Britain. Why her father abandoned her? Why her mother never told her, keeping the man on a pedestal? She is angry and hurt, poor and rejected, impulsively telling her tale of woe to a stranger in a café.Īnd that stranger, Simon Montfort, is a gossip columnist/aristocrat, who seems to have a very personal interest in the earl and the earl’s legitimate, recently engaged daughter. RELATED: ‘THE SUMMER COUNTRY’ BY LAUREN WILLIG: A BEAUTIFUL HISTORICAL EPIC Upon learning that her supposedly deceased father is actually alive – the man she has grieved since childhood – Rachel seeks to find out the truth. THE SUMMER COUNTRY will beguile readers with its rendering of families, heartbreak, and the endurance of hope against all odds.The Other Daughter is essentially a tale about a woman trying to find herself and the family that’s been denied her. Why would her practical-minded grandfather leave her a property in ruins? Why are the neighboring plantation owners, the Davenants, so eager to acquire Peverills? The answer lies in the past- a tangled history of lies, greed, clandestine love, heartbreaking betrayal, and a bold bid for freedom. Rumors swirl around the derelict plantation people whisper of ghosts. When Emily accompanies her cousin and his new wife to Barbados, she finds Peverills a burnt-out shell, reduced to ruins in 1816, when a rising of enslaved people sent the island up in flames. But when her grandfather dies, Emily receives an unexpected inheritance: Peverills, a sugar plantation in Barbados-a plantation her grandfather never told anyone he owned. Everyone knows that the family's lucrative shipping business will go to her cousin, Adam, one day. 'Tense, atmospheric, and gorgeously written, The Summer Country is a novel to savor!' – Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Huntress and The Alice NetworkĪ brilliant, multigenerational saga in the tradition of The Thorn Birds and North and South, New York Times bestselling historical novelist Lauren Willig delivers her biggest, boldest, and most ambitious novel yet-a sweeping Victorian epic of lost love, lies, jealousy, and rebellion set in colonial Barbados.īarbados, 1854: Emily Dawson has always been the poor cousin in a prosperous English merchant clan- merely a vicar's daughter, and a reform-minded vicar's daughter, at that.

The Summer Country by Lauren Willig