And then, in the blink of an eye, there’s no longer a place for Rachel in her own family. Her heart has been broken: her right to see her beloved daughter has been taken away.

Life goes on in Rachel’s home – family dinners, missing socks and evening baths – but she’s shut out from it. Becca may be tucked up in bed in Rose Cottage, but she is as lost to Rachel as if she had been snatched from under her nose.

Rachel can never forgive herself for what happened that day, and the part she played in it. But she’s starting to realise that things aren’t how she thought they were, and her husband Mitch isn’t who she thought he was either. The truths she has been punishing herself for are built on sand. Has she lost sweet Becca forever, or could finding out what really happened finally bring her back?

A heart-wrenchingly emotional drama for fans of Lisa Wingate, Kate Hewitt and Jodi Picoult.

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Books by Ali Mercer

Lost Daughter

His Secret Family

Available in Audio

Lost Daughter (Available in the UK and US)

A Letter from Ali

Thank you for choosing to read His Secret Family. If you want to keep up to date with my latest releases, just sign up here. I can promise that your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time.

If anything’s going to make you respect women, it’s being brought up by a mum who is on her own. I vividly remember sitting at our kitchen table as a teenager, doing battle with some impossible algebra homework while my mum struggled to tile the splashback behind the sink. Neither of us really knew what we were doing, but in the end she managed and so did I. Turned out it wasn’t quite so impossible after all.

I did most of my growing up in an all-female family. My parents split up when I was little and my dad lived overseas, so I didn’t see him all that often. That experience fed into me writing about an all-female family of three in His Secret Family: Jenny and her two daughters, Ava and Ellie. I was also interested in exploring what happens when a family begins to change – when patterns that have become established are broken up, and there are suddenly more questions than answers.

When I’m shaping a story I always ask myself, ‘What if?’ What if the mum in the family-of-three suddenly got involved with a new man? How would the girls feel about the arrival of an apparent outsider in their close little world, which might not always have been financially secure, but which had at least given them a measure of emotional stability? What would happen when the new man clashes with their dad – who isn’t a regular presence in their lives, but still matters to them both? What if none of the adults in the story are quite who they seem to be… and what if the decisions they made in the past are about to catch up with them?