BOOK BLURB
Emma held the photo for a long moment before her eyes focused on the girl’s face. She dropped it and let out a muted cry.The girl in the photograph was Tessa.
Twenty-five years after losing her friend Tessa in a tragic accident, Emma’s life is happy and settled. She rarely thinks about the day that Tessa fell to her death, or the secret that she made Emma swear to keep just hours before. But when her marriage implodes, Emma and her daughter find themselves unexpectedly moving into the headmaster’s former cottage on the grounds of her old school – Denham House. And it’s here she finds the photograph: an explicit image of Tessa, looking directly at the camera.
Between catching up with old friends Marlee and Clementine, who are home for a reunion, and the demands of single parenthood, Emma has plenty to distract her… but she can’t shake the image of the photograph. Or the thought that it’s proof of something she had long suspected: Dr Brownley, now headmaster, was involved with Tessa. Was it a mistake to keep quiet about what she knew?
Marlee and Clementine have their own complex feelings about returning to their hometown. And when Emma starts to question what really happened to Tessa, each woman must deal with the consequences of decisions they made all those years ago. Because the more Emma digs into the past, the more she discovers that everyone remembers it differently, and that the innocent schoolgirls she thought she knew are hiding some very big secrets.
A page-turning novel about family drama, lies, and the secrets we keep to protect those we love. Perfect for fans of Liane Moriarty, The Silent Wife and Kerry Lonsdale.
The photograph tumbled across the grass, blown by a short, cool gust of November wind. It slowed for a moment and the girl in the image was flipped onto her face. Across the other side of the oval, behind the old camellia hedge near the north gate, the girl herself lay equally still. Her school uniform had been lifted, well above regulation length, by the playful bend in her left leg. Where her upper body had taken the blow, bone had sheared the fragile nerves of her spinal cord, leaving her neck thrust sideways. Her nose had bled only briefly, the blood trickling like a single tear-drop into the curve of her lip. A shadow loomed over the trench in which she lay. After a moment, it disappeared and all was still again.
The photograph didn’t stop moving though. It flipped again as another gust caught the blades of grass, making the girl’s image skitter and dance towards the gum trees at the far end of the oval. Inside the hollow of a fallen branch, a tiny pair of marsupial eyes watched as the photograph approached. The branch stretched out like a gnarled road block at the forest edge, and as the wind whipped up again, the girl flew face-first towards it. She was naked in the photograph, and her pert breasts slammed briefly against the smooth wood before she slipped down and fell backwards. A tiny smile played across her lips and her eyes, heavy with promise, stared up at the canopy. Then, with one more small whisper of wind she was tossed into the dark embrace of the forest.
AUTHOR BIO
Sarah Clutton is an Australian author and former lawyer whose debut novel, Good Little Liars, mixes suspense and domestic drama with nuanced characters. Having majored in psychology in her original degree, Sarah is fascinated by people. How does the past shape us? Can we can learn empathy? What determines the outcomes when moral and legal boundaries collide?
Sarah's work earned her the Dymocks/Fiona McIntosh Commercial Fiction Scholarship in 2018, a coveted national award run by one of Australia's most successful commercial fiction authors and sponsored by Australia's largest book chain. An alumna of the Australian Writers' Centre novel writing course, and with a mostly-finished Master of Arts (Writing) that she has no interest in finishing because she prefers making stuff up, Sarah lives with her family in the very pretty tourist town of Bowral, near Sydney. She has lived all over Australia, and if she didn't live in Bowral, she would live in Hobart, the most beautiful city she knows.
Author Social Media Links...
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/sarahcluttonauthor/
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/sarahmclutton
PUBLICATION DATE: 2nd October 2019
PRINT LENGTH: 346 pages
PUBLISHER: Bookouture
GENRE: Literary Fiction,Woman's Fiction
PURCHASE LINKS....
AMAZON: https://geni.us/B07VGKT6C8Social
APPLE BOOKS: https://apple.co/2kuYZnY
KOBO: http://bit.ly/2YSBpAA
GOOGLEPLAY: http://bit.ly/2YS9EYK
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