The One I Was - Couverture souple

Restless, troubled Rosamond Hunter has spent most of her life running away from the past, filled with guilt about her involuntary role in her mother’s death. When her nursing job brings her back to Fairfleet, her childhood home, to care for an elderly refugee, she is forced to confront the ghosts that have haunted her for so long.

Her patient, Benny Gault, first came to Fairfleet, England, in 1939, having fled Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport train.

As his health fails, he and Rosamond begin to confide in each other. At first their tentative friendship revolves around the love they both shared for Rosamond’s glamorous grandmother, Harriet, but as their trust in each other grows, guilty secrets are exposed and history is turned on its head.

From the acclaimed author of Playing with the Moon and Restitution comes a beautiful and haunting tale of friendship, redemption and forgiveness across generations.

Revised edition: This edition of The One I Was includes editorial revisions.

Eliza Graham spent her biology lessons sitting at the back of the classroom, reading Jean Plaidy novels behind her textbooks. In English and history, however, she sat right at the front, hanging on to every word. At home she read books while getting dressed and cleaning her teeth, and during school holidays she visited the public library several times a day.

At Oxford University she read English literature on a course that regarded anything written after about 1930 as too modern to be included. She retains a love of Victorian novels and the poetry of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

Eliza’s first novel, Playing with the Moon, was longlisted for Richard & Judy’s Summer Read category and named one of the World Book Day 2007 ‘Books to Talk About.’

Find out more about Eliza on her website, elizagraham.co.uk, and follow her on Twitter @Eliza_Graham.