Book description
It was Heather's silver wedding anniversary. But this important
milestone did not mark her marriage to Tom, her often-absent airline
pilot husband and father of their two teenage children. It was for her
first marriage - a wildly romantic, secret affair, when she and Iain -
twelve years older than her and the heir to a Scottish baronetcy - had
eloped immediately after her final school speech day. She was just
sixteen at the time. The marriage had not lasted twenty-five weeks,
let alone years, and it was, as her mother firmly announced, As If It
Never Happened. But secrets have a habit of coming out, and when a
film crew arrived in the attractive Thamesside village where Heather
and Tom lived, Heather was horrified to find her ex-husband amongst them.
As Heather and Iain met again, many secrets jostled to be revealed,
including Tom's own highly secret life. Heather, her daughter Kate -
the same age as Heather was when she embarked upon her disastrous
elopement - and her mother Delia all had to reveal things which they
never thought would need to be revealed, and their peaceful
Oxfordshire village community buzzed with speculation and scandal.
Judy Astley was frequently told off for day-dreaming at her drearily
traditional school but has found it to be the ideal training for
becoming a writer. There were several false-starts to her career:
secretary at an all-male Oxford college (sacked for undisclosable
reasons), at an airline (decided, after a crash and a hijacking, that
she was safer elsewhere) and as a dress designer (quit before anyone
noticed she was adapting Vogue patterns). She spent some years as a
parent and as a painter before sensing that the day was approaching when
she'd have to go out and get a Proper Job. With a nagging certainty that
she was temperamentally unemployable, and desperate to avoid office
coffee, having to wear tights every day and missing out on sunny days on
Cornish beaches with her daughters, she wrote her first novel, Just for
the Summer. She has now had eleven novels published by Black Swan.
