After years of romantic drought, Nell is enjoying a thrilling fling with a sexy new man and loving London life, somehow managing to juggle to single motherhood with a busy career. Plus, in the city it's easy to avoid her sister who is about to marry Nell's ex. (Yes, messy.) Then she gets the news. Please could she return to Tredower, the crumbling old family home in Cornwall for the summer? Disaster. Tredower has no Wi-Fi, harbours her big, dysfunctional family, and, far worse,memories of her passionate love affair with the man who is about to become her brother-in-law. The past is another county. Can she go there?

Another woman is making her west way too, carrying an explosive secret. Love will be lost, broken, and found, lives changed for ever...

Prologue

No one should have to get up at six a.m. on a Saturday morning. And it shouldn’t be this stifling, even in August. It was like their skin was oiled, their legs slipping and sliding over each other as they concertinaed beneath the pristine white Egyptian linen that always made Nell feel like she was staying in a hotel. But Jeremy’s smart duplex in London’s Fitzrovia was better than a hotel and she wasn’t checking out any time soon. In fact, she hadn’t been back to her flat share in Hackney for days. Jeremy didn’t do Hackney.

Nell tried to get out of bed – Cornwall was at least a five- hour drive away, they needed to get going – but Jeremy pulled her back, his fingers walking into the dip between her hip bones. Within twenty minutes he had made her come twice – he was gladiatorial even on five hours’ sleep. They showered together in the wet room and Nell knew he was admiring her lean young body as she lifted her arms, slowly, one then the other, and shaved her armpits, ready for her party dress.

After the shower they were properly awake. So they could now speak and reheat the row they’d had the night before. Despite the sex, Jeremy was still pissed off: she’d broken the news that she had a press trip next month, on his birthday weekend, unfortunately. She’d apologised, explained that if she didn’t go, her editor would write her off as a non-ambitious homebody. And, come on, it was an all-expenses- paid trip to Miami! Jeremy said he’d take her to Miami. Nell said it wasn’t about Miami – well, not exactly – it was about work. It was about proving a point, he retorted, throwing a napkin at her plate of Marmite toast. The toast hopped into her lap, leaving sticky brown skids on her petal-pink silk dressing gown.

Fourteen months into their love affair they were having lots of rows, and lots of fantastic make-up sex. Nell knew she’d started to rebel a bit. Jeremy’s possessiveness, how- ever tender and flattering, had begun to feel controlling. Worse, she suspected he resented her focus on her career – she’d done well in women’s magazines but dreamed of breaking into newspapers – and that it rankled him that he, successful swinging-dick city lawyer, wanted to look after her but she didn’t want to be looked after, not yet, anyway. (The babies could wait.) Yes, she loved him. Every bit of him. How could she not? Theirs was a big love, the kind of passionate, sparking Latin love that made you feel alive. It was just that sometimes she wondered if this was enough. Jeremy wanted worship.

Ten a.m. They still hadn’t left the flat, making getting up so early completely pointless. Nell was all over the place. Whenever she went home to Cornwall – not often enough, her mother complained – she got skittish, fidgety and forgetful. And it was a hundred times worse going home with Jeremy because she worried about a member of her family doing something off-puttingly dysfunctional. Which was why she couldn’t find her make-up remover travel wipes. Or her gold gladiator flats. (She preferred heels but had to disguise that extra inch she had on Jeremy.) Nor could she find the right bra to go with her yellow halter-neck dress. Had she left the damn thing in Hackney?

Seven hours, much cursing, bickering and traffic jams later, the mercury was nudging thirty-one. With relief they finally slipped off the motorway and into the Perranortho Valley, weaving their way through leafy narrow lanes towards Tredower House where Valerie, Nell’s mother, was hosting the hog roast. An annual event set in her lush semi-tropical garden, it was the one date in the year Nell couldn’t easily flake out of, a rounding up of Valerie’s closest friends and rivals for a parade of familial harmony. Jeremy’s first. Not his last.

They piled out of his convertible and stood, hand in sweaty hand, on the gravel drive. The old stone rectory looked undeniably beautiful even to the most hardened metropolitan. Surrounded by swarms of cabbage whites, bees as big as birds and banks of blooming flowers, everything seemed to be fluttering and in motion, scented, sweating and moist. Suddenly it didn’t matter quite so much that Nell didn’t have the right bra or that she and Jeremy were irritating the hell out of each other. The day could still be rescued.

In the garden the party was in full swing. A roast suckling pig rotated on the spit with an orange in its mouth, its skin blackening and crisping like burnt toffee. Guests weaved drunkenly across the lawns. Valerie – yet to receive the diagnosis that would flip her world upside down – was animated and pretty in a sky-blue dress, trading gossip and gooseberry-growing tips and somehow working her way around the party without offending anyone. Only Nell noticed when she took five minutes out to sit alone in the summer house at the bottom of the garden, and wondered if she was thinking about Dad.

Circulating at the top of the garden, Corona in hand, was Nell’s older brother Ethan. Showing off his twin baby boys and new wife Janet to the rellies, he was chatty, sociable and charming. Nell suspected he’d just done a sneaky line of coke in the downstairs loo.

Heather, Nell’s younger sister, was in a less gregarious mood. She sat quietly on a bench beneath a pear tree, sunlight threaded in her blond hair, looking vulnerable and exquisite in a floral maxi-dress. She’d recently split from Damian, the civil servant she’d secretly hoped to marry, and Nell knew she had been dreading the hog roast with all its ‘Who’s the lucky man?’ single-girl agonies.

Nell had a theory. At summer parties and weddings single women split into two camps. One type of woman wears hot- pink or animal print, shows lots of leg and whoops across the dance floor worrying wives and advertising her availability. The other dresses as if she’s hitched, avoids dancing and slinks off without saying goodbye by midnight. Heather was the second type. All she’d ever wanted was a meat-and-two- veg love affair, then marriage, the dessert. But somehow the more she wanted it the more single she became.

She needs a gay best friend, thought Nell, as she and Jeremy walked across the lawn towards her. Shame that the only homosexual at the hog roast was Monty, the family Labrador. Then Nell had an idea. Jeremy was Just Gay Enough! He had looks, charm, wore a Ozwald Boateng suit – with pink silk lining – and was much more comfortable in the company of intelligent beautiful women than the lads. He would stop poor old Heather from being hit on by dairy farmers with yellow teeth and, in turn, Heather’s company would ease the pressure on her, which meant she could hang out with her old friend Sophie. Genius.

The party zoomed by. The sun blazed. Nell whirled across the dance floor with a peacock feather in her hair, polkaing with the village oldies, smoking a sneaky spliff with Sophie and, because it was so damn hot, knocking back unladylike quantities of sticky table wine, local cider and Pimms. By one in the morning only a small hardcore group (the childless under forties) were still partying.

Nell’s breasts ached from all the bouncing about – she’d gone braless in the end – and she was worried that she might have ruined their pencil-test perkiness for ever so she called it a night. Jeremy, excelling in being a Just Gay Enough companion to a much cheerier Heather, said he was too awake to sleep. He’d join her shortly.

At five in the morning Nell woke in her old teenage bedroom with a tongue like dried biltong. She was alone in the bed. Feeling a whoosh of nausea, she leaned over and yanked up the bedroom’s wobbly sash window to gulp some air. Outside the dawn sky was lava-lamp pink, the trees vivid green. Trippy, she thought, taking in a lungful of oxygen. And it was then she heard voices in the garden. A low indecipherable murmuring at first. Then laughter, Heather’s laughter. Jeremy’s voice? Yes, Jeremy’s voice. She vaguely wondered if she should go and join them but her brain was fuzzy, and it was so early and she was so, so tired, and, probably, yes, probably she was imagining things.

By ten the next morning, Jeremy’s limbs were wrapped around hers again. A smell of bacon wafted under the bedroom door. Forgoing hangover nookie, they stumbled down to breakfast, ravenous. Runny fried eggs. Hash browns. Oily sausages. Toast. Ethan, Janet and Heather were slumped around the battered oak dining table, bleary and smelling of booze; the twins were bouncing in their rockers; Mum, in her striped apron, was pouring a rope of dark brown tea. All as it should be ... until the moment Heather passed Jeremy the wicker basket of toast. Jeremy reached for a piece, and then, as if in slow motion, Nell noticed their fingers touch – a tiny, fleeting touch, a split-second beat of butterfly wings – then part. Jeremy glanced away. Heather looked down at the table. Her neck flushed. A terrible heaviness began to balloon in Nell’s stomach. And it was nothing to do with the fry-up.
 

Polly Williams’ best book to date. I couldn't put it down.

Chicklitreviews

A great book for curling up and chilling out with.

The Book Whisperer

So brilliant. I really enjoyed this. [Williams] is a wonderful writer.

Katie Fforde

A wonderful book. Prepare to be transported.

Hot Brands Cool Places

Great! Four stars.

Red Magazine

This is beautifully written, funny and moving in equal measure and Nell is a very appealing character. If you take this to the beach, you won’t regret it - it’s honest, warm and a pleasure to read.

The Daily Mail

Book Club Questions 

Could you ever forgive a sister for going out and planning tomarry your ex, if he used to be your One?

Does Nell’s gradual acceptance of Cornwall equate to her acceptance of her mother?

Can you think of other books where Cornwall has featured large? How has the novelist’s view of Cornwall changed over the years?

It is hard for novelists to balance plot twists with plausibility. How quickly did you realise the full extent of the family secrets buried in the book?

Do you believe Nell would be happy if she were to go on living after the finishing page?

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