The Past and Other Lies

A captivating novel about sisters, faded memories and long-hidden secrets spanning three generations.

At the height of Britain's General Strike in 1926 a red double-decker bus driven by a volunteer crashes into a low bridge in West London. Almost eighty years later Jennifer Denzel reveals on daytime television that as a teenager she'd found her sister Charlotte hanging by a school tie in their bedroom. But Charlotte can't believe her ears -- it was, she protests, Jennifer who tried to suicide all those years ago. Their grandmother Bertha dreams of a distant time: of a young man she met at a Socialist rally, an unexpected wedding and of a sister, long dead. Meanwhile her daughter, Deirdre, remembers a night during the War forty years earlier, when a V-2 rocket destroyed an entire street, and when she made a shocking discovery.

Brimming with vivid detail of London past and present, The Past and Other Lies is full of warmth, atmosphere, subtle wit and exquisite surprises.