When, on the night of their wedding, Ned asks his new wife Rose to promise that she will never leave him, Rose is quick to give her aristocratic husband her word: keeping it, however, proves far harder. For even on the day when she has promised to forsake all others, Rose’s heart is with the true love of her life, Mylo, the penniless but passionate Frenchman who, within five minutes of their meeting, declared his love and asked her to marry him.

Whilst Rose remains true to her promise never to leave Ned, not even the war, social conventions, nor the prying of her overly inquisitive and cheerfully immoral neighbours, can stop her and Mylo from meeting and loving one another.

‘An idiosyncratic mixture of love story and social comedy, full of jokes, sex and twists’

The Times

‘Spare, well-crafted prose and a mixture of racy gentility, humour and unconventionality’

Scotsman

Also available from Vintage

MARY WESLEY

A Sensible Life

‘A splendid novel’

Evening Standard

Flora Trevelyan is a ten-year-old misfit, despised by her selfish and indolent parents, and left to wander the streets of a small French town whilst her parents prepare to depart for life in colonial India. There she befriends the locals, acquires an extensive vocabulary of French foul language and encounters the privileged lifestyle of the elegant middle-class British families holidaying in 1920s France. Introduced for the first time to kindly, civilised and, above all, caring people Flora falls helplessly and hopelessly in love with not one but three young men.

Over the next forty years Flora will grow from an awkward schoolgirl into a stunning beauty and explore, consummate and finally resolve each of these affairs.

‘She writes with the knowledge and wisdom of serene old age and the emotional exuberance of glowing young womanhood’

Daily Telegraph

‘Made me both laugh out loud and cry’

Philip Howard, The Times

Also available from Vintage

MARY WESLEY

The Camomile Lawn

‘The Camomile Lawn provides equal doses of sex and repression in war-torn Britain with panache and pace’

The Times

It is August, 1939 and five cousins have gathered at their aunt’s house in Cornwall for their annual summer holiday and ritual ‘Terror Run’. There is nineteen-year-old Oliver, back from fighting in the Spanish Civil War and desperately in love with the beautiful but grasping Calypso; brother and sister Polly and Walter; and ten-year-old Sophie, orphaned at birth and unloved by her aunt and uncle. By the end of the evening war will have been declared and the lives of all five cousins will have been altered irrevocably.

The Camomile Lawn follows the cousins through the war and beyond, into adulthood and old age, united by shared losses and lovers, by family ties and friends. As each of them grows up they fight not just to survive but to remain true to themselves and to those they love.

‘A very good book indeed . . . Rich in detail, careful and subtle in observation, mature in judgement’

Susan Hill