Your Beautiful Lies

Before Ellen, things were easier and less complicated. They were either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, and I understood the difference. Since Ellen, everything has been coloured in shades of grey. From the author of The Secrets Between Us, part of the 2012 Richard and Judy Summer Reads, comes this dark, thrilling novel that is perfect for your book group. It's set 20 years ago against a backdrop of dreamy Cornish summers, a place where childhood friendship becomes young love, where love becomes obsession, and where obsession ultimately ends in betrayal and a tragic death.

Living on her family’s gorgeous lakeside estate in Cornwall, England, Alice Edevane is a bright, clever, inquisitive, innocent, and precociously talented fourteen-year-old who loves to write stories. But the mysteries she pens are no match for the one her family is about to endure ...One midsummer’s eve, after a beautiful party drawing hundreds of guests to the estate has ended, the Edevanes discover that their youngest son, Theo, has vanished without a trace.

Mary lives a contented life as wife to a wealthy merchant in Elizabethan London. But there's a part of her past she can't forget.... As a small girl she was cursed for causing the death of a vagrant child, a curse that predicts that she will hang. Sometimes the happiest households are not what they seem, and Mary's carefully curated world begins to falter. Mary's whole life is based on a lie. Is she the woman her husband believes her to be?

Best seller Wickham Hall was originally published as a four-part serial. This is the complete story in one package. Holly Swift has just landed the job of her dreams: events coordinator at Wickham Hall, the beautiful manor home that sits proudly at the heart of the village where she grew up. Not only does she get to organise for a living and work in stunning surroundings, but it will also put a bit of distance between Holly and her problems at home.

Fifteen-year-old Maisy Mitcham and her twin brother, Duncan, lose their mother to an insane asylum one night in 1960. The twins are sent to their grandmother's country house, Nightingales. Cold and distant, she leaves them to their own devices, to explore and to grow. That is until the day Duncan doesn't come home from the woods. With their grandmother seeming to have little interest in her grandson's disappearance and the police soon giving up hope, it is left to Maisy to discover the truth.