Bibliograph

The beloved girls, Harriet Evans

Type

Label

The beloved girls, Harriet Evans

Language

eng

Index

no index present

Literary Form

fiction

Main title

The beloved girls

Responsibility statement

Harriet Evans

Summary

Catherine Christophe is leaving for a romantic break in Paris with her husband when, at the Eurostar terminal, she discovers she's forgotten her passport. She kisses her husband goodbye, presses a folded piece of paper into his hand, and vanishes into thin air. Thirty years earlier, 18 year-old Janey Lestrange is heading to Exmoor to spend the summer with family friends of her father, who has recently died. The Hunter family open the doors of their manor house, Vanes, to take her in. Vanes seems inviting with its cool, green pool and faded grandeur, but from the inside it is forbidding and not a little hostile. The Hunters invite her to join their bee ceremony, held each year on St Bartholomew's Day, to pay respect to the colony of bees living in the nearby chapel. 'You take half their honey and leave half for them.' But everyone says the bees are more than usually aggressive this year... A long hot summer unfolds as two misfit girls are forced together and the ritual of the bees looms over them all. But what links Catherine Christophe to Vanes? And might it hold the key to her sudden disappearance?

Classification