Kirjahaku

A young woman's coming-of-age in 1920, the royal tour of Edward, Prince of Wales, and the secrets that surface more than seventy years later. "A perfectly heartbreaking tale of royalty, lies, and friendship."--Kristin Harmel, author of The Room on Rue Am lie Australia, 1920. Seventeen-year-old Maddie Bright embarks on the voyage of a lifetime when she's chosen to serve on the cross-continent tour of His Royal Highness, the dashing Edward, Prince of Wales. Life on the royal train is luxurious beyond her dreams, and the glamorous, good-hearted friends she makes--with their romantic histories and rivalries--crack open her world. But glamour often hides all manner of sins. Decades later, Maddie lives in a ramshackle house in Brisbane, whiling away the days with television news and her devoted, if drunken, next-door neighbor. When a London journalist struggling with her own romantic entanglements begins asking Maddie questions about her relationship to the famous and reclusive author M. A. Bright, she's taken back to the glamorous days of the royal tour--and to the secrets she has kept for all these years.

Iris is getting old. A widow, her days are spent living quietly and worrying about her granddaughter, Grace, a headstrong young doctor. It's a small sort of life. But one day Iris receives something unexpected in the post - an invitation to a WWI reunion in France. Determined to go, Iris is overcome by memories of the past and of her journey to France in 1914, where she followed her young brother Tom, intending to bring him home to safety. But on her way to find Tom, Iris discovers the old abbey of Royaumont, where a group of women work to set up a field hospital. Putting her fears aside, Iris decides to stay and help. It is at Royaumont that she truly comes of age, finding her capability and her strength, discovering her passion for medicine, making friends with the vivacious Violet and falling in love. But war is a brutal thing, and there is a terrible price that Iris has to pay - a price that will echo down the generations.

1925. Fifteen-year-old Catherine Quick longs to strike out into the warm waters of her Australian home just as she's done since she was a tiny child. But now living in London with her aunt Louisa, Catherine feels that everything she values has been stripped away. Louisa, a busy surgeon who fought boldly for women's equality, wants Catherine to pursue an education to ensure her future freedom. Since Catherine arrived, however, Louisa can't put a foot right and she is finding it harder to block painful memories from her past. A chance encounter leads both women to New York where Catherine can test her mettle against the first women in the world to swim the English Channel, and where Louisa can come to an understanding with her niece and with herself.

I am by nature a private person. Secrets are different from privacy. They are things you are forced to keep to yourself, by family, friends, by your own shame. Secrets like these come to the surface one day and demand an airing.Emerging from an unconventional, boisterously happy childhood, Mary-Rose MacColl was a rebellious teenager. And when, at the age of fifteen, her high-school teacher and her husband started inviting Mary-Rose to spend time with them, her parents were pleased that she now had the guidance she needed to take her safely into young adulthood.It wasn't too long, though, before the teacher and her husband changed the nature of the relationship with overwhelming consequences for Mary-Rose. Consequences that kept her silent and ashamed through much of her adult life. Many years later, safe within a loving relationship, all of the long-hidden secrets and betrayals crashed down upon her and she came close to losing everything.In this poignant and brave true story, Mary-Rose brings these secrets to the surface and, in doing so, is finally able to watch them float away.