**An international bestseller – and a sweeping love story set between the wars.**

For lovers of Downton Abbey – a sweeping love story set between the wars.
‘An excellent story… strong imaginative power… wonderful atmosphere’ Joanna Trollope

In the 1930s, an English country house and garden is decaying. How is it to be saved? In love with Daisy, its heir Kit Dysart meets the rich heiress Matty. Nervous and unhappy though she is, Matty is no fool and knows that her marriage will be one of convenience and she will be mistress in a house which is full of ghosts. Summoning her courage and determination, she begins to restore the garden – and , suddenly, Matty finds that happiness is within her reach.

A haunting, passionate love story played out between three people, Consider the Lily is wonderfully stylish and compulsive reading.

‘The literary equivalent of an English country garden’ – Sunday Times

‘An old fashioned novel in the best sense of the word' - Chicago Tribune

‘A gorgeously well-written tale: funny, sad and sophisticated’ – Independent

‘Superb characterizaton, an absorbing love story and wonderful evocation of an English country house and garden’ Annabel

‘Dark family secrets, ghosts, tragic death and doomed love… touching and unputdownable’ Company

## About the Author

Elizabeth Buchan began her career as a blurb writer at Penguin Books after graduating from the University of Kent with a double degree in English and History. She moved on to become a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full time. Her novels include the prizewinning Consider the Lily – reviewed in the Independent as ‘a gorgeously well written tale: funny, sad and sophisticated’. A subsequent novel, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman became an international bestseller and was made into a CBS Primetime Drama. This was followed by The Good Wife, That Certain Age, The Second Wife and Separate Beds. Daughters is her latest novel.

Elizabeth Buchan’s short stories are broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in magazines. She reviews for the Sunday Times, and has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes, and also been a judge for the Whitbread (now Costa) awards. She is a patron of the Guildford Book Festival and of The National Academy of Writing.

She is currently writing a novel about the Danish Resistance during the Second World War.

Elizabeth Buchan loves to make contact with her readers. Join her on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ElizabethBuchanAuthor?ref=hl

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### From Library Journal

The impact that money or its lack can have on relationships among family and between men and women is clearly outlined in this English historical novel by the author of Daughters of the Storm (Bantam, 1990). Three alternating narratives show how Matty and her cousin Daisy become entangled with an attractive man, Kit. Brief allegorical chapters about flowers and gardening are interspersed in this tale of starcrossed lovers, set in the period between the two world wars. Will unattractive, moneyed Matty be able to keep her purchased man, or will spirited, attractive Daisy steal him away? Astute readers won't need the gardening chapters to figure out where this tale will end. Recommended for libraries where English family historicals and Regency romances have an audience.
*- Sue Mevis, Ludlow Memorial Lib., Monroe, Wis.*
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

### From Kirkus Reviews

British writer Buchan (the paperback Daughters of the Storm, 1990) weaves a romantic, nostalgic tale of passion, dark family secrets, and the gentle solace of gardening, set in England in the Thirties and Forties. Matty Verral was orphaned in Damascus as a child and left to the care of her vicious, social-climbing aunt, Susan Chudleigh, who raised her in London--and who's now extremely irked that the wren- like, plain Matty is rich, while her own daughter, Daisy, beautiful and spirited, has no fortune at all. When Matty and Daisy are on holiday in the south of France and meet Kit Dysart, their handsome, well-born young countryman, both cousins fall in love--but Daisy is the one to whom he's powerfully and instantly attracted. Meanwhile, it's known that Kit's family has suffered in the post-WW I economic slump and that his beautiful family home, Hinton Dysart, is threatened. In a move that reveals the steely will beneath her frail exterior, Matty makes Kit a proposal he can't refuse: she will marry him and allow him to share in her fortune, at the same time permitting him the freedom to lead his own life. They marry once back in England, but Kit continues to be haunted by Daisy. Matty knows his feelings and unhappily accepts them--as well as her sorrow that she's unable to conceive a child. She occupies herself in redoing Hinton Dysart, and especially in renovating an abandoned garden, where occasionally she believes she glimpses a ghostly child. Then hints begin to surface of mysterious sorrows and carefully guarded secrets in her husband's family's past: sexual irregularities, tragic accidental death, suicide. Matty begins to probe--little suspecting that she'll soon have to face some painful discoveries of her own. Absorbing romance, well-drawn, sympathetic characters, vivid evocation of the beauties of English gardens and country houses- -plus a nice fillip of the supernatural. -- *Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.*