A sweeping story of forbidden love, family secrets, loss and second chances.

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Dublin, 1962. Aileen Moran is seventeen, newly married and already carrying secrets she believes she must take to her grave.

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When tragedy brings Gerald Kenny into her life, he offers everything she has longed for: tenderness, safety and the chance to begin again. 

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Gerald’s ambition as a heart surgeon takes them from Dublin to Cape Town and back again, but the secrets they both harbour begin to pull them apart. 

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Their longed-for son Sean is born into a rapidly changing Ireland but some truths remain dangerous and, like his parents, Sean learns that loving someone and having the courage to admit it are very different things.

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Across two generations, the Kenny family will discover that buried secrets do not disappear. They pass from one life into another - until love finally proves stronger than silence.

Evie is lost, grief stricken and unhappy when she meets Finn who is also emerging from a traumatic experience in a previous relationship. When the two meet they fall deeply in love, and both are changed by the experience in profound ways. They vow to remain each others’ anamchara or soulmate.Then,  to Finn’s deep distress, Evie abruptly ends the relationship without explanation.

When they meet again twenty years later, both Finn and Evie are forced to understand that what had happened between them as students was not the end of their love story but the beginning of its consequences.