After her mother's death, Madelaine is left to bring up her younger sister. Discovering that she is illegitimate, Madelaine out of desperaton marries a wealthy cousin of her father's who does not know her true identity. And thus she comes to live at the family estate Eden which her mother had loved more than anything.

The second novel in the ravishing Eden trilogy set amongst the lush and decaying sugar plantations of Jamaica. Nothing about Sophie Monroe is ‘appropriate’. She's too outspoken, too determined, and her childhood hero, Ben Kelly, grew up in appalling poverty in the London slums. Her only haven is Eden, the hauntingly beautiful plantation in Jamaica, where her sister Madeleine leads a charmed existence with her husband and children. But when Sophie returns from England in the summer of 1903, she finds Eden on the brink of ruin. Nothing is as it seems. Ben is avoiding her, and Madeleine is hiding something. But what? What could be so wrong that she can’t tell her own sister? Now Sophie must face not just a clash of loyalties, but the savage prejudices of colonial society. And finally, she must confront the ghosts of her own past . . .

Since she was 12 years old, Belle has lived with a secret—a secret which cuts her off from her family, and isolates her wherever she goes. Against the unfolding horror of the Great War, her search for peace takes her from the brittle gaiety of English country house society to the remote Scottish mansions where her grandmother's tragedy was played out, and to the battlefields of Flanders. As the scarred and shattered men return from the trenches, and an influenza epidemic scythes across the country, Belle must finally discover a way to break free of her secret or lose everything.