Between the Lines

Lucy's ex-husband is asleep in her spare room, freshly dumped and freshly hopeful, and she's about to discover exactly how much she's changed since he left. But the real reckoning happens somewhere else entirely: among the shelves of a Darby Street bookshop, where a name gets spoken out loud for the first time, and a door that's been closed for weeks finally, quietly, opens. Some chapters end with a kiss. This one ends with a folde...

Lucy breaks the one rule she was ever given. And this time, for the first time, he answers. A name. A yacht. A storm off an island she'd never heard of until it became the centre of everything. It's the most Henry has ever given her, and she falls the rest of the way in the telling of it. But love, apparently, waits for no one, not even to catch its breath, because by the time Lucy makes it home, her past is already sitting on the ...

Lucy discovers she's a better liar than she ever suspected, and doesn't much like what that says about her. A journalist leaves a folder she doesn't want. A storm leaves her stranded under one umbrella with the man she's not supposed to want either. And a secondhand book turns up an inscription that changes the shape of everything she thought she knew. Some secrets keep themselves. This one just found a new home in a drawer under t...

Lucy Halloran has been keeping a secret,

and for once it isn't the sad kind.

Three Thursdays now.

A locked bookshop on Darby Street, the blinds down, and a man teaching her to stop apologising for her best sentences.

She hasn't told Ada. She hasn't told her daughter. She has barely let herself believe it.

But Newcastle is a small town dressed up as a city, and someone has just walked through the door with a question Lucy isn't ready ...

Lucy has read the page forty times. She has counted.

A stranger dropped a single typewritten sheet in her Darby Street bookshop, and it's unmistakably the voice of the world's most famous invisible author. A voice from a book that doesn't exist.

When she returns it, she gets more than she bargained for. He reads her secret, unfinished novel. He offers to help her finish it. And he sets one condition, delivered like the price it truly...