The Visitors' Book

The Story

Caroline Upcher delighted readers on both sides of the Atlantic with Grace & Favor, an emotionally powerful tale of two sisters learning to make peace with their entwined pasts and presents. In 'The Visitors' Book,' Upcher comes back to this emotional landscape, with the story of an upper class British family's entanglements with marriage partners and illicit liaisons, as a young man marries in haste, and like his father before him, brings home a bride who wants to change everything.Though internationally famous for her lush historical novels, middle-aged grande dame Victoria Hissey lives alone in the big house at Laybridge. Her beloved godson Ortlando, a charming rascal she raised after his parents' death, will someday inherit everything. Meanwhile, he uses The Cottage nearby for his weekends away from London. Only when Orlando meets and marries a virtual stranger on a Caribbean beach does Victoria realize that Laybridge's secrets are no longer safe.When plain, non-nonsense Lindy arrives with Orlando for her first weekend at The Cottage, she encounters a world where neither her morals nor her lifestyle fit. Firmly middle class and ambitious to have her own career, she finds Victoria formidable, Orlando's endless parties pointless, and Rose, the cook's beautiful daughter, obviously in love with her new husband.Then Victoria presents Lindy with The Visitors' Book, a diary-like journal begun generations earlier and continued by Orlando's mother Daisy. Lindy soon realizes that The Visitors' Book holds the key to the estate's mysteries. . .and neither a marriage nor a woman's heart may survive its revelations.