ALLEGRA by Anna Lisle
1822:
Byron's young illegitimate daughter dies in an Italian Convent,
banished from the mother who adored her. 1838: young Alice Clarke,
unhappily married to a brutal man, is pursued on London's streets by a
mysterious Greek man and a cloaked woman. Alice illicitly loves a sea
captain sailing the perilous route to India around Africa. When he
vanishes on a voyage, her pursuers draw her into an increasingly tense
game of cat and mouse, played out between the early Victorian squalor of
London's Rookeries and the splendor of its new Mayfair squares. A
murder in Regent's Park reinforces the message that Alice is involved in
a very dangerous game. But how can she possibly be linked to a
brilliant and notorious group of English poets living in Italy sixteen
years earlier?
British
author Anna Lisle is no stranger to world of fiction -- she also writes
as the traditionally published Eliza Graham, author of, among other
titles, Playing with the Moon, a bestseller in Europe. Eliza has morphed
into Anna for the purposes of writing novels with a Victorian setting.
As you'd imagine of a Brit writing about nineteenth-century London, Anna
Lisle writes in British English.
