From the bestselling author of The Moonlit Garden comes the sweeping, romantic tale of one woman's quest across two continents and one hundred years of history to unearth her family's deepest secret.

Diana Wagenbach is the sole survivor in a withering family tree fraught with secrets. When the first in a trail of clues is handed down to Diana by her great-aunt on her deathbed, along with a plea to assuage their family's guilt by revealing all, Diana obliges. She follows the clues--a picture here, a letter there, a pressed frangipani flower in a book--that carry her away from her philandering husband in Berlin to a charming manor in England and all the way to a tea plantation in Sri Lanka.

Diana unravels the dramatic tale of her great-great-grandmother, Grace Tremayne, with the aid of Jonathan Singh, a local historian and writer--and someone with whom she feels a deep bond that sparks into romance. As Grace's tragic past in exotic colonial Ceylon is revealed and the family's sins come to light, Diana finds inspiration in her ancestor's courage and begins to rethink what happiness--and love--is worth, and how the surest route to peace is in setting the truth free.

Book Talk

Start the conversation