The Sea Garden - Tapa dura

Following on from her TV Book Club success with THE LANTERN, Deborah Lawrenson returns to the south of France with another captivating story of wartime love and bravery.

Present day. On the lush Mediterranean island of Porquerolles off the French coast, Ellie has accepted a commission to restore an abandoned garden. The fine house and surrounding estate overlook the glittering sea but the longer Ellie spends there, the more she senses darkness.

The owner's mother, Madame de Fayols, takes pleasure in unsettling and undermining her. Her stories of the Domaine's past reveal a lingering evil that seems to haunt the garden. It gradually becomes clear that Madame de Fayols has a very personal reason for wanting to destroy Ellie's peace of mind...

Second World War. Two very different women have their lives irrevocably changed: Iris, a junior intelligence officer in London and Marthe, the blind girl who left her rural farmstead to work in the lavender fields and is slowly drawn into the heart of a Resistance cell operating in Nazi-occupied Provence. As secret messages are passed in scent and planes land by moonlight, danger comes ever closer...