Itzabella
One moment Claire Matthews is in a museum reading room, turning the pages of a dead soldier's diary.
The next, she is standing in a blacked-out London street with fire on the horizon and bombs in the air - wearing clothes she doesn't recognize, holding nothing, eighty years from home.
It is September 1940. The Blitz is fifty-two nights old. And the first person to find her in the dark is Captain James Cuthbert - charming, guarded, shipping out to North Africa in eight days - whose father's diary is the very thing that brought her here.
Claire is a historian. She knows how this war ends. She knows the streets, the rationing, the language of survival. What she doesn't know is why she was sent, how to get back, or what it means that she keeps finding reasons to stay.
James doesn't know what to make of a woman who arrived in the middle of a raid with no luggage, no story that quite holds together, and an unnerving habit of already knowing things before he tells her. He tells himself it doesn't matter. He's leaving in eight days.
Eight days is a very short time.
Eight days is long enough for everything to change.
A sweeping, slow-burn romance set against the fire and resilience of wartime London - for readers who believe that the most dangerous journeys are the ones that take you somewhere you were always meant to be.