Description:

The year began with the death of a beloved king and the ascension of a charismatic young monarch. By its end, the world would be stunned to see that new leader give up his throne in the name of love, just as a Second World War looms. Amidst this whirl of social and political upheaval, nineteen-year-old May Thomas takes the first steps toward creating a new life, securing a job that opens her eyes to the activities of the uppermost echelons of British society—and her heart to a man seemingly beyond her reach. Julian Richardson’s Oxford degree has catapulted him from his mother’s middle-class parlor to holidays spent at stately homes and dinners in the company of a king. But his uneasy heart cannot put aside his undeclared affection for May. Evangeline Nettlefold is a girlhood friend of the American socialite Wallis Simpson and a new arrival to London from Baltimore. She will be generously welcomed into society’s most glittering circles, but as the resentment she feels toward Wallis grows in magnitude, so too does the likelihood of disastrous consequences. In pitch-perfect prose, *Abdication* captures an era in which duty and pleasure, tradition and novelty, and order and chaos all battle for supremacy in the hearts and minds of king and commoner alike.