Rosamond Cadden

Her husband didn't come home from the war. Fifteen months later, she is told of a gardener in Paris who cannot remember his own name.

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 as an author was made with words; now not one will come.

But grief has found her a remedy. Mescaline was legal in 1919, and it carries her to a sunlit farm in Suffolk where no one has died and nothing hurts. Each visit is more beautiful than the last. But is it, truly?

When her sister Mathilda 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.

And then, on her twenty-fifth birthday, her publisher brings her news from Paris.

Rosamond Cadden opens the Daughters of the Armistice series. The women of her far-flung family will follow her onto the page in the interwar period — among them a bride, a racing driver and a dreamer — and it is Rosamond herself, pen in hand, who will tell their stories. This is where the chronicle begins. Readers of In Picardy's Fields will find old friends here — among them Madeleine de Dragoncourt, who will have a book of her own.

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.