Bloomsbury, London, 1919. The Armistice is signed, the bells have rung, and London is learning to breathe again. Everyone, it seems, but Rosamond Cadden.

The celebrated young novelist has lost her mother, her unborn child, and her husband Reggie — missing in France, mourned without a grave. Her name was made with words; now not one will come. But grief has found her a remedy that carries her to a sunlit farm in Suffolk where no one has died and nothing hurts. Each visit is more beautiful than the last. Or so it seems.

When her sister discovers how far she has drifted, Rosamond swears a desperate oath: to lie on the couch of her brother-in-law, Otto Schiller, a Viennese psychoanalyst — and to fight for her own mind. Session by session, the White Rose she once was struggles against the Black Rose she was becoming.

Her fight will lead her, by the most unlikely of roads, to news she'd never dared hope for in a million years.

Rosamond Cadden opens Daughters of the Armistice. Four more women of her far-flung family will follow her onto the page — a bride, a racing driver, a dreamer, a fighter — and it is Rosamond herself, pen in hand, who will tell their stories. This is where the chronicle begins.

Series description Daughters of the Armistice

The guns have fallen silent. Now the women must live in the world the Armistice made.

Daughters of the Armistice follows five unforgettable women of one far-flung family through the years between the world wars — beginning at a Bloomsbury writing desk in 1919 and ending in Occupied France in 1944. A grieving novelist fighting for her own mind. A fiery bride from the ruins of Picardy. A racing driver taking on the men at Le Mans. A restless dreamer on the Adriatic shore. A partisan fighter in the darkest years of all.

Each book bears its heroine's name and tells a complete story — but together they form one family's chronicle of love, loss and quiet defiance across a quarter of a century. And the chronicler is one of their own. It all begins with Rosamond Cadden — the novelist who must find her way back from the darkness before she can tell the others' stories.

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