Description
From Sunday Times bestselling novelist Rose Tremain comes a gripping novel of murder and revenge set in Victorian England Nobody knows yet that she is a murderer… London, 1850.
On a freezing winter’s night, a baby is abandoned at the gates of a park only to be saved by a young policeman and taken to the Foundling Hospital.
After suffering years of brutal hardship at the Hospital, Lily is released into the world of Victorian London. But she is hiding a dreadful secret… When Lily and the policeman meet again, Lily is convinced that he holds the key to her happiness.
But might he also be the one to uncover her crime and so condemn her to death?
‘Enthralling… Tremain evokes Victorian London with visceral intensity in a gripping and deeply humane novel exploring themes of rejection, poverty, guilt and redemption’ Observer
Sarah TURNER –
Lily is abandoned as a newborn in London in Victorian England. Rescued and taken to the Foundling hospital she is fostered in the Suffolk countryside for the first 6 years of her life. But the rules of the Foundling Hospital are that all children have to be returned from foster care when they are 6 years old to learn skills to give themselves a profession to repay the hospital for taking them in as abandoned babies.
Lily’s years at the hospital were brutal and the staff cruel and violent but she never forgot the love of her foster family and is desperate to find her way back to them.
Beautifully written and a perfect heroine in Lily. She’s courageous and bold, but with a fragility as she seeks love after so much cruelty. You can’t fail to root for her throughout even though the book does open with her confessing to murder!