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The London house : a novel

An uncovered family secret sets one woman on the journey of a lifetime through the history of Britain's WWII spy network and glamorous 1930s Paris in an effort to understand her past, save her family, and claim her future. One call could bring ruin to her family name. Caroline Payne thinks it is just another day at work when she receives a call from Mat Hammon, a doctoral candidate, who has uncovered a dark and scandalous family secret: her British great-aunt defected to the Nazis to marry her German lover. The letters tell a different story. In search of answers, Caroline flies to London to search her grandmother's diaries and her aunt's letters. In them she discovers the "Waite girls" and a time of peace and luxury in the interwar years that is beyond anything she ever imagined. But the buoyant tone quickly changes as the sisters grow older, fall in love with the same man, and one leaves home to join the glamourous art scene of 1930s Paris-all amid the rumblings of war. But history won't let its secrets go so easily. The more Caroline learns, the more questions she has. Together Caroline and Mat work to dig out answers, uncovering stories of spies and love, of family rifts, and of one fateful evening in 1941. Will the truth they uncover heal the decades-old family wounds, or will they tear the family even further apart?

Book  - 2021
FIC Reay
1 copy / 0 on hold

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  • ISBN: 9780785290209
  • Physical Description 355 pages ; 22 cm
  • Publisher [Place of publication not identified] : [publisher not identified], 2021.

Content descriptions

General Note:
Includes discussion questions.

Additional Information

Syndetic Solutions - Publishers Weekly Review for ISBN Number 9780785290209
The London House
The London House
by Reay, Katherine
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Publishers Weekly Review

The London House

Publishers Weekly


(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A woman searches for the truth about the disappearance of her ancestor in the spellbinding latest from Reay (Dear Mr. Knightley). Caroline Payne, a Boston pharmaceutical worker, receives a call from her college friend Mat Hammond, whom she hasn't seen in six years. Mat is writing an article for the Atlantic focusing on Caroline's great-aunt, Caroline Waite, whom Mat believes left her work for the British government during WWII to be with her Nazi lover. Caroline embraces the idea of finding out what happened to her great-aunt, who disappeared in 1941, and travels to London where her mother is now living to undertake the search. There, she pours through diaries and letters from her great-aunt and her grandmother Margaret, discovering how the relationship between the identical twin sisters was fractured when Margaret nearly died from scarlet fever, and Caroline moved to Paris to work for the designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Caroline asks Mat to come to London to help her search as they unearth a family's deepest secrets and grow closer to each other. Reay's fast-paced foray into the past cleverly reveals a family's secrets and how a pivotal moment shaped future generations. Readers who enjoy engrossing family mystery should take note. Agent: Claudia Cross, Folio Literary Management. (Nov.)