From the Heart Book

You're a young woman. You can choose. Which career to pursue. Who to have sex with. Who to marry and have children - or not - with. This is now. Step into the shoes of Olive. You're a happy, open-hearted girl. Your (tricky) mother is dead and you live with your father in a solid, Edwardian house with apple trees in the garden. Your passion for books gets you easily into university, where the world is surely waiting for you. There, you meet a boy. But then you make a mistake - the kind any one of us could make - and face an impossible choice. You are young, still, and full of hope. You can't possibly know how that mistake will sit in your heart. Or that when you get a job at a school you will fall in love with an older colleague. But the affair must stay secret; the world won't have it any other way. All you have ever wanted is for your heart to be free. But you are living in a time and place where freedoms we now take for granted had the power to destroy. Praise for Susan Hill: Subtle and profoundly moving...one of our finest novelists. (Sunday Times). Almost unbearably poignant...this short book will live long in the memory. (Independent on Sunday). A novel of great structural and stylistic control. (Guardian).Read More