Emma Darwin
The Mathematics of Love
Emma Darwin
It is 1819 and Stephen Fairhurst, a veteran of Waterloo, wants only peace. At Kersey Hall, the house to which he has returned after a long exile in Spain, he hopes to forget the horrors of the battlefield and remember only the great and secret love he lost. But, despite his unconventional and growing friendship with the clever Lucy Durward, their correspondence does not at first touch on the darkness in his past.
In the hot summer of 1976 the teenaged Anna is ripe for adventure. She is sent instead to what seems its opposite: a failed rural school run by her estranged uncle. And so, hot, bored and lonely, she becomes entangled in two men’s lives: Theo, a war photographer in exile, and the man who owned the house a hundred and fifty years ago: Stephen Fairhurst.
However, neither generation can hope for peace for long. The past holds too many secrets to be forgotten and the future holds love, and the pain of love. For while Anna unravels Stephen’s secrets, she is creating an impossible one of her own; and, before Stephen can move on, he must face his history.
Birdsong told the story of the First World War. Atonement described the Second. Now there is The Mathematics of Love, Emma Darwin’s extraordinary debut. From the gentle Suffolk countryside to the battlefields of Waterloo and the old Basque towns of Spain, this is a profoundly moving account of war and the pain of loss, the heat of passion and the redemptive power of love.
The Mathematics of Love is published by Headline Review. It will appear in the UK in July 2006 and in the US in early 2007. Emma's web site is here
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