Ellen Melville, a clever seventeen-year-old typist in an Edinburgh lawyer’s office and an ardent suffragette, falls in love with Richard Yaverland, a confident traveller home from abroad. When he takes her south to meet his mother in the Essex marshes, she finds herself inside a family history of illegitimacy, shame and possessive love that reaches back a generation.
West’s intense second novel, a study of mothers, sons and the judgment of the past. Download the free EPUB.