From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl Born into an aristocratic family, beautiful Amy Lovell leads a whirlwind life of extravagant parties and debutante balls. But Amy, curious about the world beyond the narrow confines of her class, is ill-suited to a life of indulgence. Eagerly embracing a nursing career, she is drawn into the radical politics of the day. As the spectre of war looms, Amy's bittersweet love for the proud miner Nick Penry - a love which defies the differences between them - leads them to the conflict in Spain, where love and pain become inseparable agonies. 633 pages Author Janey King, née Morris was born on 1947 in Denbigh, Wales, and also grew up in North Wales. She read English at Oxford, and after a spell in journalism and publishing, she began writing fiction after the birth of her first child. Published since 1982 as Rosie Thomas, she has written fourteen best-selling novels, with themes of love and loss. She is one of only a few authors to have won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association, in 1985 with Sunrise, and in 2007 with Iris and Ruby. Janey is an adventurer, and once she was established as a writer and her children were grown, she discovered a love of traveling and mountaineering. She has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, spent time on a tiny Bulgarian research station in Antarctica, and traveled the silk road through Asia. She currently lives in London.