Lilla Eckford, interned in a Japanese civilian camp in China during the Second World War after an extraordinary early life, passed her time compiling a book about the joys of food. This inspired her great-granddaughter, Frances Osborne, to investigate her story.
Frances Osborne Books
Frances Osborne delves into the intricacies of human relationships and societal expectations through incisive biographical portraits. Her writing is distinguished by meticulous research and a narrative style that breathes life into the past while illuminating timeless human experiences. Osborne explores the lives of compelling women, uncovering their inner worlds and external struggles with empathy and intelligence. Her work offers rich historical and psychological insights that resonate with contemporary readers.
'This is a truly astonishing book. Frances Osborne has not just brought to life a dizzyingly rich and scandalous slice of social history, she has produced a tragic and deeply moving tale as well. It is far more gripping than any novel I have read for years' Antony Beevor
Park Lane
- 322 pages
- 12 hours of reading
A Goldsboro Crown Historical Fiction Award Nominee The bestselling author of The Bolter returns with a delicious novel about two determined women whose lives collide in the halls of a pedigreed London town home. When eighteen-year-old Grace Campbell arrives in London in 1914, she’s unable to fulfill her family’s ambitions and find a position as an office secretary. Lying to her parents and her brother, Michael, she takes a job as a housemaid at Number 35, Park Lane, where she is quickly caught up in lives of its inhabitants—in particular, those of its privileged son, Edward, and daughter, Beatrice, who is recovering from a failed relationship that would have taken her away from an increasingly stifling life. Desperate to find a new purpose, Bea joins a group of radical suffragettes and strikes up an intriguing romance with an impassioned young lawyer. Unbeknownst to each of the young women, the choices they make amid the rapidly changing world of WWI will connect their chances at future happiness in dramatic and inevitable ways.