Booklist
"An extraordinary story, a complex, deeply engaging tale filled with fascinating characters whose slowly revealed secrets carry readers to the very end. Spanning four generations and moving from the great palaces of India to the stately country home of an English lord, this is a sweeping tale of love lost and found."
Booklist
"An extraordinary story, a complex, deeply engaging tale filled with fascinating characters whose slowly revealed secrets carry readers to the very end. Spanning four generations and moving from the great palaces of India to the stately country home of an English lord, this is a sweeping tale of love lost and found."
Library Journal
12/01/2014
Riley's multigenerational saga opens in 2000, with 100-year-old Anahita reminiscing about the events of her storied life—her friendship with an Indian princess, her wartime journey to England as the princess's companion, and her thwarted romance with an English noble. Paralleling Anahita's story is the tale of Rebecca Bradley, an American actress who meets Anahita's great-grandson while filming in England. The two discover a tragic secret, hidden for generations, that could change their lives. (LJ 2/15/14)
Kirkus Reviews
2014-01-22
Stretching from Darjeeling, India, to Dartmoor, England, the latest romantic saga from a popular British novelist confidently blends multiple storylines, large helpings of tragedy, a fairy-tale villain and some startling plot twists. "My child, I remember," begins Indian Anahita Chavan's 300-page letter to her lost son, whose mysterious life is the central thread of Riley's (The Lavender Garden, 2013, etc.) fourth novel. The daughter of a healer, Anahita inherited her mother's gifts, including an element of second sight that has convinced her for 80 years that the son she bore in 1919, and whom everyone believed dead at age 3, is still alive. Upon Anahita's death, it falls to her great-grandson Ari, a successful Indian IT entrepreneur, to read her manuscript and follow its trail to Astbury Hall, a country house in England. Now, in 2011, the hall is being used as the location for a movie starring American screen favorite Rebecca Bradley. Uncannily, Rebecca bears an extraordinary likeness to Violet Astbury, the American heiress whose grandson Anthony now presides over Astbury Hall's slow decline. Anahita's tale of love for Donald Astbury, a World War I officer, and the birth of her son, twinned with Rebecca's present-day involvement with a substance-abusing Hollywood hunk, is engrossing until the closing chapters, when both women's stories lurch into Hitchcock-ian melodrama. Riley continues her run of solid, if earthbound, love stories, but this one derails close to its conclusion.
