Ask Alice [Paperback]

Glamorous Alice Keach is one of 1930s London's foremost Society hostesses. Despite humble American origins, she has secured her place in high society through marriage to one of England's wealthiest bachelors.

But Alice has a secret. Its roots run years back, and miles away, to the dust-blasted prairies of Kansas. It corncerns a lost little boy left under the haphazard guidance of an eccentric uncle. Now, a visit from America looks set to blow apart Alice's glittering pre-eminence forever.

1904. A pretty young woman travels apprehensively across the American prairies; on a whim she makes a bold decision, grabbing her future with both hands. A lonely little boy, growing up a world away between-stairs in an Edwardian country house, has his future decided for him by impending war and an old woman who parcels him off to her eccentric brother in the flatlands of Norfolk.

A quarter of a century later, in the brightly coloured world of London high life, Alice Keach is queen among society hostesses. Her face stares from every gossip column. Behind her lie a marriage to a wealthy landowner, and a career as a celebrated actress. But Alice has a secret, whose roots run five thousand miles away to that Kansas train-ride, and a chain of connection with the potential to blow her comfortable existence apart. A half-hearted blackmailer making his way across the Atlantic; a watchful teenage boy observing the birth of a lucrative new colour in a Norfolk pigpen; a Bright Young woman coming to terms with an unsatisfactory marriage; a country house party that ends in tragedy; a sensational murder trial: all these are gathered up in the story of Alice's rise and fall.

Ranging from the Dakota badlands to the drawing rooms of Mayfair, and from the Norfolk back-lanes to the casting couches of the Edwardian theatre, Ask Alice is a remarkable novel of concealment, subterfuge and revelation, depth-charged with wit and intrigue, and dominated by its characters' gradual awareness that the choices which confront them have the capacity to change their lives.

'Utterly gripping...you are in for a treat' Literary Review

'The characters capture the imagination, while the story has the tension of a thriller, the sensitivity of a romance and the wit of an idiosyncratic adventure' Easy Living

Glamorous Alice Keach is one of 1930s London's foremost hostesses. Despite humble American origins, she has secured her place in high society through marriage to one of England's wealthiest batchelors.

But Alice has a secret. Its roots run years back, and miles away, to the dust-blasted prairies of Kansas. It corncerns a lost little boy left under the haphazard guidance of an eccentric uncle. Now, a visit from America looks set to blow apart Alice's glittering pre-eminence forever.

'Ambitious and immensely accomplished' Guardian

'Highly accomplished ... engrossingly plotted ... vibrant' Mail on Sunday