The Gilded Lily-----pan macmillan
Beauty is skin-deep. Blood is deeper.
Winter, 1661. In her
short life Sadie Appleby has never left rural Westmorland. But one night
she is rudely awoken by her older and bolder sister, Ella. She has
robbed her employer and is on the run. Together the girls flee their
home and head for London, hoping to lose themselves in the teeming city.
But the dead man's relatives are in pursuit, and soon a game of cat and
mouse ensues amongst the freezing warren that is London in winter.
Ella
is soon seduced by the glitter and glamour of city life and sets her
sights on the flamboyant man-about-town, Jay Whitgift, owner of a beauty
parlour for the wives of the London gentry. But nothing in the capital
is what it seems, least of all Jay Whitgift. Soon a rift has formed
between Ella and Sadie, and the sisters are threatened by a menace more
sinister than even the law.
Set in a brilliantly realised Restoration
London, The Gilded Lily is a novel about beauty and desire, about the
stories we tell ourselves, and about how sisterhood can be both a burden
and a saving grace