-Beattie explores our humanity in its beauty and brokenness through women-s voices. Fictional voices of the marginalised have been inserted in the recorded history of the country, not to create an alternative history but to add to its rich, multi-faceted texture.- (Chiedza Musengezi, Zimbabwean poet and author)
-Msasa trees provided dappled shade for Jenny-s tea party. April sunshine dribbled through the leaves onto suntanned arms. The frangipanis were in bloom ...-
This is the scene that greets Scottish doctor Morag soon after her arrival in Salisbury in the 1950s. Jenny is an English wife and mother trapped in an increasingly violent marriage and secretly in love with another man. Soon, Beatrice will come to work as Jenny-s maid and nanny to her children. Over the next twenty years these three women will form deep bonds of affection, but can their loyalty to one another survive as the fa-e of white suburban life is shattered by war?
In a novel
