ABOUT
THE BOOK

For years, James Edward Phillips kept his wife and children in the dark about his past. On the few occasions when he made some reference to his early life, he spoke as though he had emerged into history at the age of six when someone in London had packed his belongings in a little wooden box and put him on a train to Bristol.
When her father dies, Louie discovers that she didn’t know him at all. Suddenly there are people claiming to be relatives, people Louie and her sister have never heard of, people who knew their father very well indeed.
What was her father’s secret? Why would anyone have hidden a whole other life, decade after decade? As Louie researches life in the gas-lit streets of Victorian London to find the truth about her father’s family, she takes the scant facts she can gather and imagines what really happened into a story of her own: a story of better instincts corrupted by circumstance, of rending betrayals, blinding passion and love lost; a story which will reveal as much about the present as the past.