In this heartwarming follow-up to the bestselling novel Postcards From a Stranger, will Cara’s family past ruin her Christmas present, or will she let love in?
After discovering her mother’s secret life, Cara doesn’t have much faith in marriage.
So when the love of her life, Simeon, proposes, she struggles to say ‘I do.’ She adores him, but why risk the perfect relationship by signing on a dotted line that could ruin everything? If her parents’ marriage taught her anything, it was that a gold ring doesn’t equal happiness, and she has no desire to follow in their dysfunctional footsteps.
But maybe there’s a bigger picture after all. When a tragic accident brings yet more truths to the surface, Cara is forced to question everything she believes—and fears—about long-term love. And the answers aren’t obvious…
Could Cara rewrite her family’s history and create her own love story?
A strange encounter. An unlikely friendship. But will it survive when they both know the truth?
As single mother Leah struggles to get her children ready one morning, the doorbell rings. Standing on the doorstep of their terraced house in Whitley Bay is a well-dressed stranger, Clio, who feels an emotional tie to the house that she can’t explain. The story should end there, but a long-buried secret is already on its way to the surface…
In some ways the two women couldn’t be more different: Leah’s a mother of two and the daughter of a barmaid; Clio’s a perennially single heiress to her baroness mother’s estate. But where Leah lacks grown-up company, Clio lacks any experience of the real world, and the unlikely friendship sparked by their curious first meeting offers both of them a welcome respite from the routine of their lives.
It is a friendship that will answer questions neither of them knew to ask, uncovering secret stories from the past that have stayed hidden for decades. But will it also be the catalyst for them to finally feel that they belong?
A dying wish. A devastating secret. Should the truth really stay buried?
The four Bliss siblings have a loving but complicated bond, but when their mother, Dorothy, dies seemingly without a will, this relationship is put to the test. As the mourning siblings try to make sense of the situation, one of them is caught with a secret: before she died, Dorothy entrusted her favourite daughter with her will and a letter—and told her to destroy them both.
Of course it was Anna their mother turned to for this mission. Miriam, the eldest, is far too sensible; Sebastian, the baby, too sensitive; and Clare, the middle child, has always been too rebellious to rely on, and long ago cut herself out of her siblings’ lives.
But what Anna finds in the documents could change everything. Do the other siblings not deserve to know what it is about them that their mother was so desperate to hide? And if it is revealed, will the Bliss family ever be the same again?
A secret lies buried at the heart of her family—but it can’t stay hidden forever.
When Cara stumbles across a stash of old postcards in the attic, their contents make her question everything she thought she knew.
The story she pieces together is confusing and unsettling, and appears to have been patched over with lies. But who can tell her the truth? With her father sinking into Alzheimer’s and her brother reluctant to help, it seems Cara will never find the answers to her questions. One thing is clear, though: someone knows more than they’re letting on.
Torn between loyalty to her family and dread of what she might find, Cara digs into the early years of her parents’ troubled marriage, hunting down long-lost relatives who might help unravel the mystery. But the picture that begins to emerge is not at all the one she’d expected—because as she soon discovers, lies have a habit of multiplying . . .
Revised edition: This edition of Postcards from a Stranger includes editorial revisions.
