Daphne - Tapa dura

Praise for Wish I May: 'A beautiful, elegiac and intensely readable novel.' Zoe Heller 'A child's eye view steeped in an English Edwardian literary air reminiscent of Rosamond Lehmann and P.L. Travers, tightly written and promisingly observed.' Ali Smith Praise for If the Spirit Moves You: 'Unusual and commanding unputdownable.' Zadie Smith Praise for My Mother's Wedding Dress: 'Spellbinding the kind of book you want to gobble up in one sitting.' Maggie O'Farrell

It is 1957. The author Daphne du Maurier, beautiful, famous, despairing as her marriage falls apart, finds herself haunted by Rebecca, the heroine of her most famous novel, written twenty years earlier. Resolving to write herself out of her misery, Daphne becomes passionately interested in Branwell, the reprobate brother of the Bronte sisters, and begins a correspondence with the enigmatic bibliophile Alex Symington as she researches a biography. But behind Symington's respectable scholarly surface is a slippery character with much to hide, and soon truth and fiction have become indistinguishable.In present-day London, a lonely young woman, newly married after a fleeting courtship with a man considerably older than her, struggles with her PhD thesis. Her husband, still seemingly in thrall to his brilliant, charismatic first wife, is frequently distant and mysterious, and she can't find a way to make this large, imposing house in Hampstead feel like her own. Retreating instead into the comfort of her library, she begins to become absorbed in a fifty-year-old literary mystery. The last untold Bronte story, "Daphne" is a tale of obsession and possession; of stolen manuscripts and forged signatures; of love lost, and love found. It is a beautiful, original novel from the acclaimed author of "Wish I May".