In India, 1935, Amelia Collins is left destitute by the death of her missionary parents and leaves their home in the Himalayan foothills to find work in Darjeeling. There she meets District Officer Reginald Holden, a powerful older man, who spirits her away to start a new life as his wife in Ganpur. Amelia soon forms a bond with Reginald’s young son, Arthur, and resumes missionary work in the villages around Ganpur. There, she discovers a pavilion on a lake where the wives of maharajahs once bathed, now abandoned and cloaked in mystery. When the Indian independence movement flares in Ganpur and Reginald struggles to contain it, Amelia's world begins to fall apart as she uncovers the shattering truths he has been keeping from her. Decades later, when Kate Hamilton inherits her great aunt Amelia's country house, she begins to unearth Amelia’s secrets from her years in British India. But Kate is harbouring a secret of her own and is convinced that unlocking the truth about Amelia’s Indian past will hold the key to her own future.

Simultaneously hinting at the Indian and British setting, our cover cooks delicately distilled a woman of mixed race descent dressed in a 1930s crisp white shirt and tweed pencil skirt. Surrounded by mountains and with her back facing the readers, the woman is seen elegantly leaning against a vintage open topped car and gazing out towards an Indian lakeside pavilion in deep contemplation.