A SEASON OF SECRETS

Beginning in 1915 A Season Secrets is the story of the Fentons, an aristocratic family from Yorkshire. In childhood Thea, Olivia and Violet Fenton, and their American cousin Rozalind, make friends with Carrie Thornton, granddaughter of their father’s old nanny, and Hal, son of one of their father’s tenant farmers. The friendships survive into adulthood and Thea flouts the unwritten rules of her class by embarking on a passionate affair with Hal, and by becoming as fierce a socialist as he is. Olivia is far more conventional and forges friendships with members of the royal family and attends finishing school in Germany. She marries a German, and as Countess von der Schulenburg experiences at first hand the dangerous changes taking place in Germany. Violet becomes an actress, unaware, when she accepts a film contract with the Babelsberg Studios in Berlin that it will lead to her working for British Intelligence. Rozalind, in love with a married man, is a photojournalist whose work takes her into the heart of Hitler’s Germany. As opposing ideologies threaten to drive the Fentons apart it is Carrie who keeps them united, and it is Carrie who finds herself married to the man she has dreamed of marrying ever since her childhood; a man she had thought could never be hers.

‘Margaret Pemberton is one of the best saga writers around, writing gritty, gutsy tales.’

Sarah Broadhurst

The Bookseller