A Story in the Historical Romance Universe
1935 Dorchester, Dorset, England. A shop assistant embarks on a steamy love affair with an older man. This brings her romance, kinky sex, love, and eventually heart-break.
Ever since their days at Oxford, respectable vicar Cedric and his devoted wife, Phyllida, have shared an obsession with the mythical creatures of antiquity. They live a quiet life in rural Dorset until a group of hippies camps near their church. On a cider-and-acid-fuelled night in 1968, the couple’s mythical obsessions collide with reality. Hurdy Gurdy Man echoes from the surrounding hills, leading to a wild, hallucinatory orgy that changes everything for the vicar and his wife.
May, a war widow struggling to keep her Dorset smallholding alive after the brutal winter of 1946/47, is close to despair when two charming drifters arrive offering help in exchange for board and lodging. Their kindness, humour and dangerous influence draw her into acts she would once have thought unthinkable. By the time they vanish with the summer, they have left her carrying far more than memories. A reason to live.
Uprooted from rural Dorset as a child, Jack Barnesfield is given a second chance when he is taken in by a farming family in Ontario. As he grows to manhood, war, love and old grievances shape his life. From the trenches of the Great War to the quiet fields of Canada, Jack journeys in search of justice, only to learn that the things of the past are sometimes best left in the past.