Autorentext

Rosamunde Pilcher was born in west Cornwall in 1924. Her father, a civil servant, worked in Burma, so that her mother mostly raised Rosamunde and her sister alone. She later ascribed this solitary childhood to firing her fierce imagination. Having written stories all this time, she made her first short story sale aged just nineteen. This was her vocation, and she began producing novels under the penname of Jane Fraser for Mills and Boon. In her sixties she wrote The Shell Seekers, some of it loosely based on her own wartime experiences, which became a huge international bestseller, particularly in America and Germany - a country that has now made over 100 TV films of her stories. Pilcher has been described as an 'unromantic' romantic novelist, adding both grit and realism to tales that are strongly tied to their locations in time and place, particularly her beloved Cornwall. She died in 2019, aged 94.

Klappentext

Rediscover the brilliance of A Long Way From Home in the Mermaid Collection - classic books by popular pioneering female authors republished to delight new generations of readers.

'The Mermaid Collection is so sure footed that you're unlikely to go wrong' India Knight

A sweeping and page-turning romance that sees eighteen-year-old Katy Kelsey flee her Scottish Hebridean island for the Mediterranean in search of belonging, family and new horizons . . .

With a foreword by Claire Daverley

'This was the time of the day she loved almost the best in Santa Carina. Neither day nor night, sunlit and yet with the leisurely pace of evening . . .'

When the aunt who raised her on a remote Scottish island dies, orphan Katy Kelsey heads to London to seek out her grandfather, Charles Kelsey.

Instead, she encounters the Kelsey family's dashing lawyer Adam Maxwell. Unsure what to make of this destitute waif, Adam decides to help, and flies Katy out to the family villa on the Spanish island of Santa Carina.

There she meets the other Kelseys - who resent this cuckoo in their midst. And Katy fears they'll uncover the secret reason she came to find her grandfather.

The only one she dares trust is Adam. But can a simple island girl really trust her own complicated feelings?

Praise for Rosamunde Pilcher

'Pilcher's storytelling skills are beguiling' The Times

'Pilcher wrote absorbing page-turners, taking what was called "romantic fiction" to an altogether higher, wittier level' Guardian