The unexpected arrival of her willful teenage granddaughter, Ruby, brings life and disorder to 82-year-old Iris Black's old house in Cairo. Ruby, driven by her fraught relationship with her own mother to run away from England, is seeking refuge with the grandmother she hasn't seen for years.
An unlikely bond develops between them, as Ruby helps Iris to record her fading memories of the glittering, cosmopolitan Cairo of World War II, and of her one true love--the enigmatic Captain Xan Molyneux--whom she lost to the ravages of conflict.
This long-ago love has shaped Iris's life, and, as becomes increasingly apparent, those of her daughter and her granddaughter. And it is to affect them all, again, in ways they could not have imagined.
Author Biography
Rosie Thomas is the author of numerous critically acclaimed, bestselling novels, including "The Kashmir Shawl," which won the Romantic Novelists' Association's Epic Romantic Novel Award. She has won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award twice, for her novels "Iris & Ruby" and "Sunrise." Born in a small village in northern Wales, Thomas discovered a love of traveling and mountaineering when her children were grown. In the years since, she has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, trekked in the footsteps of Shackleton on South Georgia Island, and spent time on a tiny Bulgarian research station in Antarctica.
