Sarah Whitman

The continuing story of the Whitman family...

Diane Pearson was born in London but spent a large part of her childhood with her grandparents in a village on the Surrey/Kent borders. She is the bestselling author of Csardas, The Summer of the Barshinskeys and Voices of Summer and is President of the Romantic Novelists' Association. In 1994 she won the British Book Award for Editor of the Year.

A 'God is an Englishman' kind of novel - about a very human kind of Englishwoman, a woman who fought her way up from domestic service to schoolmistress and whose life was touched by three men, one who taught her what it was to love and be loved, another who waited for her in vain, and a third - the strange tormented man who was to be her destiny. 
 
Rich in adventure, history and human passions, this is a novel of astonishing breadth...an enthralling panorama of life and love between the wars...

The Marigold Field

The Marigold Field is the story of poor, proud, high-spirited people...people whose roots were in the farming country of southern England...in the bawdy and exuberant streets of the East End. 
 
Jonathan Whitman, his cousin Myra, Anne-Louise Pritchard and the enormous Pritchard clan to which she belonged, saw the changing era and incredible events of a passing age - an age of great poverty and great wealth, of straw boaters, feather boas, and the Music Hall... 
 
And above all The Marigold Field is a story of one woman's consuming love...of a jealous obsession that threatened to destroy the very man she adored...

Bride Of Tancred

Diane Pearson was born in London but spent a large part of her childhood with her grandparents in a village on the Surrey/Kent borders. She is the bestselling author of Csardas, The Summer of the Barshinskeys and Voices of Summer, is President of the Romantic Novelists' Association and is Senior Editor for Transworld Publishers. In 1994 she won the British Book Award for Editor of the Year. She now lives in London and is married to Richard Leech, the actor.

Miriam Wakeford was full of hope when she arrived to take up her new appointment as needlewoman and companion in the bleak, windswept house of Tancred, high on the South Downs.Her strict Quaker upbringing was no preparation for the experiences which awaited her there... 
 
John Tancred, a widower, was a mysterious, moody figure, frequently harsh and sometimes surprisingly kind.His young daughter, Esmee, seemed unbalanced...John Tancred's mother was an imperious old lady who ruled the decaying mansion from her wheelchair.Above all, the atmosphere was filled with the evil, violent presence of John's dead father, Richard, who by his excesses had brought ruin, infamy and tragedy to the name of Tancred.

Diane Pearson

The Russian section is reminiscent of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, horrifying yet hauntingly beautiful

An engrossing saga...she evokes rural England at the turn of the century with her sure and skilful touch

'Although the story of the Barshinskeys, which became our story too, stretched over many summers and winters, that golden time of 1902 was when our strange involved relationship began, when our youthful longing for the exotic took a solid and restless hold upon us...' 
 
It is at this enchanted moment that The Summer of the Barshinskeys begins.A beautifully told, compelling story that moves from a small Kentish village to London, and from war-torn St Petersburg to a Quaker relief unit in the Volga provinces, it is an unforgettable story of two families.

Diane Pearson

Praise for The Summer Of The Barshinskeys

The Russian section is reminiscent of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, horrifying yet hauntingly beautiful

An engrossing saga...she evokes rural England at the turn of the century with her sure and skilful touch

Books by Diane Pearson

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