THE HIDDEN GIRL was previously published as The Hidden Beauty which was written under the author's pen name Lucinda Edmonds.
In The Hidden Girl, we follow closely Leah Thompson's life and the people she is surrounded by especially her mother's employee Rose Delancey. We first meet Leah when she's 11 and in parts follow her journey in her early 20s.
While Leah is a Yorkshire girl, born and bred, the farmhouse owner and 50s famous painter Rose is from war-torn Polland whose journey to England has been immensely difficult and heartbreaking. Leah is an only child, beautiful, taller than the other village kids and close to her parents.
Rose has two kids, Miles and Miranda. She has a brother David who she's estranged from. One summer, David sends his teenage son Brett to live with Rose for the summer holidays. This is David's way of extending a peace offering to his only remaining family after two decades of silence.
The summer changes everyone's life with Leah being spotted by a modeling agency, Rose's career getting a second lease on life and her kids' lives having their own share of changes. Everyone's life progresses and when Leah invites her past friends to her 21st birthday in London, things move in a more sinister direction.
There's glamour from Leah, Rose and their professional lives as a supermodel and a painter. There's intrigue, horror and heartbreak from Rose and David's past life. Through Brett, Leah finds herself in the middle of it all after she's had a separate life personally and professionally.
For someone of modest beginnings, the characters see a lot of power, money and luxury in their life and that makes for an interesting contrast. While they have everything they could've ever dreamt of and then some more, it is like their hearts aren't seeing it all. There's still restlessness, yearning and a certain level of detachment that they feel.
There are two tracks, one that of Leah and her family, and the other of Rose and her family. Both of them have a high-flying work life with difficult, at times, heartbreaking personal lives. We see them experience all of life's lows and highs.
The story reminded me of some old-school writers like Barbara Taylor Bradford and Jackie Collins for the locations and glamour. While their books were multi-generational sagas this book has a World War II reference and the heartbreak of the holocaust.
What I loved was Leah and how she conducted herself throughout the story. There are characters you will love, characters you will hate and some you will want to unalive and have thrown off the cliffs too. So there's a bit of everything - the good, bad and ugly, which will keep you turning the pages.
THE HIDDEN GIRL is moving, emotional, and heartbreaking while it's also a love story that has an eventful journey of soaring highs and lows.
Sweeping and evocative, The Hidden Girl is a lost treasure from the global number one bestselling author Lucinda Riley.
You can't alter destiny . . .
Born and raised in a small village on the Yorkshire moors, Leah Thompson grows more beautiful with each passing day. When she catches the attention of the influential, troubled Delancey family, she knows her life will never be the same again.
Years later, Leah takes the modelling world by storm, travelling from Milan to London and New York and living life in the lap of luxury. But her past follows her like a dark shadow, mysteriously intertwined with the tragic tale of two young siblings in Poland during the Second World War.
As two generations of secrets threaten to explode, Leah is haunted by a fatal, forgotten prophecy from her past, and must fight to challenge the destiny that has been mapped out for her in the stars . . .
Long before she became the bestselling author of The Seven Sisters series, Lucinda Riley wrote Hidden Beauty as Lucinda Edmonds. This standalone novel has been reworked and given new life as The Hidden Girl by Harry Whittaker, Lucinda's son and co-author of Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt.