The Beloved Girls: The new Richard & Judy Book Club Choice with an OMG twist in the tale
About this audiobook
'It's a funny old house. They have this ceremony every summer . . . There's an old chapel, in the grounds of the house. Half-derelict. The Hunters keep bees in there. Every year, on the same day, the family processes to the chapel. They open the combs, taste the honey. Take it back to the house. Half for them -' my father winced, as though he had bitten down on a sore tooth. 'And half for us.'
Catherine, a successful barrister, vanishes from a train station on the eve of her anniversary. Is it because she saw a figure - someone she believed long dead? Or was it a shadow cast by her troubled, fractured mind?
The answer lies buried in the past. It lies in the events of the hot, seismic summer of 1989, at Vanes - a mysterious West Country manor house - where a young girl, Jane Lestrange, arrives to stay with the gilded, grand Hunter family, and where a devastating tragedy will unfold. Over the summer, as an ancient family ritual looms closer, Janey falls for each member of the family in turn. She and Kitty, the eldest daughter of the house, will forge a bond that decades later, is still shaping the present . . .
'We need the bees to survive, and they need us to survive. Once you understand that, you understand the history of Vanes, you understand our family.'
(P) 2021 Headline Publishing Group Ltd
About the author
Harriet Evans has sold over a million copies of her books. She is the author of thirteen bestselling novels, most recently The Beloved Girls, a Richard and Judy Book Club Selection and the Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller The Garden of Lost and Found, which won Good Housekeeping's Book of the Year. She used to work in publishing and now writes full time, when not distracted by her children, other books, gardening, her jumpsuit collection and now star-gazing, having acquired a telescope whilst researching The Stargazers. She volunteers with Inspiring the Future, is an ambassador for the London Library and last year was elected to the Management Committee of the Society of Authors. She lives in the greatest city in the world (Bath) with her family.
