Other Women

'Exquisite' - Will Dean

'This is a book that will stay with you' - Ann Cleeves

In a lonely cottage on a deserted stretch of shore, a moment of tragedy between lovers becomes a horrific murder. And two women who should never have met are connected for ever . . . Six years after the end of the Great War, a nation is still in mourning. Thousands of husbands, fathers, sons and sweethearts were lost in Europe; millions more came back wounded and permanently damaged. Beatrice Cade is an orphan, unmarried and childless - and given the dearth of men, likely to remain that way.

London is full of women like her: not wives, not widows, not mothers. There is no name for these invisible women, and no place for their grief. Determined to carve out a richer and more fulfilling way to live as a single woman, Bea takes a room in a Bloomsbury ladies' club and a job in the City. Then a fleeting encounter changes everything. Bea's emerging independence is destroyed when she falls in love for the first time.

Kate Ryan is an ordinary wife and mother who has managed to build an enviable life with her handsome husband and her daughter. To anyone looking in from the outside, they seem like a normal, happy family - until two policemen knock on her door one morning and threaten to destroy the facade Kate has created.

From the author of Little Deaths, longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, comes the sensational Other Women. Mesmerising, haunting and utterly remarkable, this is a devastating story of fantasy, obsession inspired by a murder that took place almost a hundred years ago.