The Harrison family gathers as usual for Christmas in their big Sussex house - a tight safe world of festivity and family ritual. This year however outside realities are pressing hard: Pamela and John married for four decades know that time is catching up with them. And trouble is brewing in the lives of their four children. Cassie the cossetted youngest is in the throes of an affair with a married man; Elizabeth her awkward older sister is struggling with a faltering second marriage; Peter the eldest and designated inheritor of Ashley House is beginning to meet resistance to such a prospect from his career-orientated wife. Only Charlie the charming and carefree younger son and his wife Serena seem truly content with nothing to worry about except their adolescent twin girls and the simpler teething troubles of their toddler.Everywhere the scent of change is in the air. Yet change when it comes strikes in the form of a tragedy of the most unforeseeable and devastating kind. The family so apparently secure begins to unravel. And secrets past and present are exposed laying bare the fragility of human happiness and the myriad faces of love in an imperfect world.
Amanda Brookfield gained a First Class Honours Degree from Oxford before working at an advertising agency for several years. She wrote her first novel while living in Buenos Aires with her diplomat hu... more
