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by Louise Walters
A heartbreaking and deeply compelling debut, Mrs. Sinclair's Suitcase is a compulsive page-turner about thwarted love, dashed hopes, and family secrets—book-club fiction at its best.
Roberta, a lonely thirty-four-year-old bibliophile, works at The Old and New Bookshop in England. When she finds a letter inside her centenarian grandmother's battered old suitcase that hints at a dark secret, her understanding of her family's history is completely upturned. Running alongside Roberta's narrative is that of her grandmother, Dorothy, as a forty-year-old childless woman desperate for motherhood during the early years of World War II. After a chance encounter with a Polish war pilot, Dorothy believes she's finally found happiness, but must instead make an unthinkable decision whose consequences forever change the framework of her family.
The parallel stories of Roberta and Dorothy unravel over the course of eighty years as they both make their own ways through secrets, lies, sacrifices, and love. Utterly absorbing, Mrs. Sinclair's Suitcase is a spellbinding tale of two worlds, one shattered by secrets and the other by the truth.
"Starred Review. A breathtaking, beautifully crafted tale of loves that survive secrets." - Kirkus
"Touching on popular themes, both bookish and war related, this novel aims high but falls just short of the target. It's a solid debut, however, and may appeal to those who have also liked bookishly romantic stories such as Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society or Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry." - Library Journal
"A heartbreaking tale of loss, missed chances, and enduring love." - Good Housekeeping (UK)
"A first novel of great charm and assurance, beautifully told and utterly gripping." - The Times (UK)
"A riveting debut with an impeccably researched past and charismatic present-day voices. Mrs. Sinclair's Suitcase is like opening a literary treasure chest, full of sharp-edged gems glittering with all the beauty and heartache of humanity." - Sarah McCoy, author of the New York Times international bestseller The Baker's Daughter and The Mapmaker's Children
"A moving reminder that history is not just a pageant of world-shaking events, but a weave of individual lives that are often as inspiring as they are tragic." - David R. Gillham, author of the New York Times–bestseller City of Women
"Vivid and seductive, the tale begins in a blazing crash in World War II and twists through a tangle of mysterious circumstances, misunderstandings, and repressed desires. Irresistible..." - Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman, authors of the national bestseller Freud's Mistress
"Like forgotten letters and photos tucked inside secondhand books, secrets hide within the pages of Mrs. Sinclair's Suitcase. Louise Walters has crafted a heartbreaking story of love and all its faces." - Jessica Brockmole, author of Letters from Skye
"Walters creates a totally absorbing world, and takes you right into the heart of her story. Beautifully done, and heartbreaking, too." - Esther Freud, author of The Sea House and Hideous Kinky
This information about Mrs. Sinclair's Suitcase was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Louise Walters lives in Northamptonshire with her husband and five children. Mrs. Sinclair's Suitcase is her first novel.
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