Thank you so much for reading Mrs P’s Book of Secrets. I hope you’ve loved Lucy’s determined account of her effort to begin her life again within the quiet rooms of the Kershaw and Kathay Book Press. I certainly loved helping her to discover love and friendship there.
This is a book about the echoes of the past. It is a ghost story without white shrouded spectres, or wailing ghouls. The fading notes of those who have passed are simply a steady part of Lucy’s struggle to discover the healing freedom of her newfound life in the Cotswolds.
This is also a book about belonging. Lucy is feeling a bit unsure of her place now that she has come home. She doesn’t know it, but Robert is facing a similar struggle. He is a man who has endlessly had to stand firm for what he truly wants instead of resuming his high-flying career in medicine, particularly when every part of the past is touched by so many memories of his life as a POW. For me there is something wonderful in the way he assembles plants and oddments for Lucy’s advent calendar. The final collection forms an anagram for his proposal, but his first message, the anagram of MERRY XMAS, is almost more important.
He decides to extend a little gesture of friendship to Lucy after their first brief meeting on the stairs in her aunt’s house. He isn’t asking anything of her, but he wants to find a harmless means of showing her how important she is. And he does it long before she has learned how to talk to him about her past, or learned that he and her aunt and uncle conspired to bring her home – or even told him how much she values the simple kindness of his presence in the office.
Friendship touches every part of their lives in that old building. Books are a vital theme too. They almost rank as a character in their own right. The books in Lucy’s life certainly have a personality. They link the past to the present, and forge connections between people too. Lucy herself describes books as a wonderful monument to unity. And they are – not least because they play such a crucial role in the search for the old couple.
Personally, I find it incredible to comprehend how many people have been involved in the creation of this book. The book within your hands, whether digital or print, is formed of the words that have grown in my mind, but, beyond that, so many people have played their part.
My editor at One More Chapter made vital suggestions about the text. Then other people in the team took the finished work and formatted it, and made it ready to meet the world. Someone cared to design the cover. Someone engineered the e-reader app, or operated the machine that printed the book too. And someone, often many people, were involved in getting the book to the person who will read it. There is something truly uplifting in that.
Lucy’s story unfolds in 1946. When I research a book, I am usually drawing on oral history from the time, so in a way my characters borrow from real voices. Perhaps it is my background in archaeology, but I am the sort of person for whom the traces of the past are ever present in the world I see around me. In this book, Lucy takes an intensely personal journey into the heartfelt connection she feels between herself and those who have gone before her. I find it quite strange to consider that, by now, at the present year of writing this, Lucy’s first discovery of trust and healing with Robert in that old creaking office would in itself count as history.
I can’t help wondering where life has taken them since then. I know they will have been happy.
With love,
Lorna