From the author of TV Book Club favourite The Legacy, comes an emotionally powerful story exploring the dark heart of love. Just before WW2 Mitzy Hatcher’s lonely Dorset life is transformed by the arrival of a renowned artist for whom she becomes the muse. However, as she grows up innocent love becomes obsessive with consequences that reach forward over 70 years. Webb is simply an excellent storyteller and she is getting better with each book.
England, 1937. In the village of Blacknowle on the Dorset coast, fourteen-year-old Mitzy Hatcher has endured a wild and lonely upbringing. Shunned by her neighbours, the arrival of renowned artist Charles Aubrey, along with his exotic mistress and their daughters, is like a breath of fresh air. As Charles's muse, Mitzy develops a deep and abiding bond with the Aubrey household over the course of the following three summers. Gradually, Mitzy begins to perceive a future she had never thought possible, and a powerful love is kindled in her. A love that will grow as she does: from innocence to obsession; from childish infatuation to something far more complex. It will be almost seventy-five years before the consequences of this potent desire are fully played out, as a young man in an art gallery looks at a hastily-drawn portrait and wonders at the intensity of it. The questions he asks will lead him back to Blacknowle, and draw him to the truth about those fevered summers in the 1930s. Moving from the wilds of the Dorset coast to the intoxicating heat of a Moroccan summer, A Half Forgotten Song explores the quixotic nature of memory - and the perils of obsessive love.
Katherine Webb was born in 1977 and grew up in Hampshire before reading History at Durham University. She has since spent time living in London and Venice, and now lives near Bath, UK. Having worked as a waitress, au pair, personal assistant, bookbinder, housemaid, library assistant and seller of fairy costumes, she is now a full-time writer. Her debut novel, The Legacy, won the popular vote for the TV Book Club Summer Read 2010 and was shortlisted for Best New Writer at the 2010 Galaxy National Book Awards. Her subsequent novels The Unseen, A Half Forgotten Song and The Misbegotten were all Sunday Times Top Ten Bestsellers, and her books have been translated into 26 languages around the world.
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