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For more than three decades, “master storyteller” (Cosmopolitan) Rosie Thomas has enthralled readers around the world. Her latest, If My Father Loved Me, is an affecting novel of the complexities of family and the sacrifices we make for the ones we love.

Sadie’s life is calm and complete. She is a mother, a good friend, and the robust survivor of a marriage she deliberately left behind. She has come to believe that she has everything she wants and deserves. But now her father is dying—the elusive man who spent his life creating exquisite perfumes for other women is slipping away from her, and Sadie must try to make her peace with him before it’s too late.

As Sadie confronts the truth about her father, who often ignored her as he pursued his separate life, her relationship with her son Jack also appears to be breaking down. Intent on salvaging her relationships with both son and father, her seemingly perfect life unravels from both ends. Then the arrival of an ephemeral woman from her father’s past sets off a chain reaction of events that even Sadie cannot control. An absorbing and vividly descriptive story “enriched by Thomas’s compassion and wry sense of humor” (Woman & Home), If My Father Loved Me confronts the intricacies of love, pain, and the rebuilding of a fractured family.

By the same author

By the same author:

Celebration

Follies

Sunrise

The White Dove

Strangers

Bad Girls, Good Women

A Woman of Our Times

All My Sins Remembered

Other People’s Marriages

A Simple Life

Every Woman Knows a Secret

Moon Island

White

The Potter’s House

Iris and Ruby

Sun at Midnight

Constance

Lovers and Newcomers

The Kashmir Shawl

The Illusionists

Daughter of the House

Dedication

For DCM
With love always

ONE

‘My father was a perfumer and a con artist,’ I said. ‘You would like him. All women do.’

I was telling Mel this, my dear friend Mel, on what was then still an ordinary night.

We had arranged to meet in a new restaurant and I had got off the tube one stop early and walked for ten minutes to reach it. It was that tender time between winter and very early summer that is too fragile and understated, in the city, to count as a proper spring. The plane trees in the great squares were shyly licked with pale green and there would be cherry blossom in suburban gardens. I noticed that the sky was pale grey, almost opalescent, and shafts of light like cathedral pillars struck down between the concrete buildings.