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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2019
Copyright © Alexandra Brown 2019
Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photographs © Evelina Kremsdorf/Arcangel (Landscape, front), Shutterstock.com (Stamps, flowers and back cover)
Alexandra Brown asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008206666
Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008206673
Version: 2019-05-16
For all the people who care for other people
‘The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.’
Audrey Hepburn
Contents
Dedication
Betty’s Truly Scrumptious Babka Cake
Tindledale, in rural England, 1939
The flip of a coin is all it had taken to seal seventeen-year-old Constance Levine’s fate.
‘Heads, she goes to Aunt Rachael in Manhattan,’ her mother had declared, barely able to even look at her ‘wanton’ daughter, the word she had used on first discovering Connie’s condition.
Manhattan.