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From the Orange Prize shortlisted author of GRACE WILLIAMS SAYS IT LOUD, an entrancing novel about a young French girl and the English family who invade her Alpine village and her life.

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´Henderson´s Grace Williams Says It Loud was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and this more than matches it.´
Elizabeth Buchan, Daily Mail

In June 1914, Sir Anthony Valentine, a keen mountaineer, arrives with his family to spend the summer in their chalet, high in the French Alps. There, for the first time, fourteen-year-old foundling Mathilde starts work as one of the ´uglies´ - village girls employed as servants and picked, it is believed, to ensure they don´t catch Sir Anthony´s roving eye.

For Mathilde it is the start of a life-long entanglement with les anglais - strange, exciting people, far removed from the hard grind of farming. Except she soon finds the Valentines are less carefree than they appear, with a curiously absent daughter no one talks about. It will be decades - disrupted by war, accidents and a cruel betrayal - before Mathilde discovers the key to the mystery. And in 1976, the year Sir Anthony´s great-great grandson comes to visit, she must decide whether to use it.

Vividly evoking the dramatic landscape that so enthrals the Valentines, this deeply involving, intriguing novel tells the story of an English family through the generations and a memorable French woman, whose lives seem worlds apart yet which become inextricably connected.

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I was totally seduced by this vivid, complex and enthralling novel Fanny Blake Woman & Home

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Henderson, Emma
Emma Henderson was educated at Godolphin and Latymer School, London, Somerville College, Oxford and Yale University, Connecticut. She wrote blurbs for Penguin books for two years, then spent a decade teaching English in comprehensive schools and further education colleges, before moving to the French Alps where, for six years, she ran a ski and snowboard lodge. She now lives in Derbyshire and is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Keele University. GRACE WILLIAMS SAYS IT LOUD was her first novel. The Valentine House is her second novel.

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