On a small stretch of untamed coast, five old clapboard houses gaze out to sea. Fourteen-year-old May Duhane, arriving with her father and sister for the summer, feels isolated and resentful. Leonie Beam, staying in the neighbouring house with her husband's family, shares May's isolation for she is unhappy in her marriage. She confides in Elizabeth Newton, an aging widow who keeps the beach's secrets. Meanwhile, May has discovered the diary of a dead girl, her own age. To unravel its story, she must immerse herself in the past. As she does so, she begins to feel she is destined to follow in the dead girl's footsteps.
Author
Janey King, née Morris was born on 1947 in Denbigh, Wales, and also grew up in North Wales. She read English at Oxford, and after a spell in journalism and publishing began writing fiction after the birth of her first child. Published since 1982 as Rosie Thomas, she has written fourteen best-selling novels, deal with the common themes of love and loss. She is one of only a few authors to have won twice the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association, in 1985 with Sunrise, and in 2007 with Iris and Ruby. Janey is an adventurer and once she was established as a writer and her children were grown, she discovered a love of travelling and mountaineering. She has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, spent time on a tiny Bulgarian research station in Antarctica and travelled the silk road through Asia. She currently lives in London.
