Rosie Thomas, "a master storyteller" (Cosmopolitan) has been enrapturing readers, earning awards, and garnering critical praise for more than three decades. Here, she offers a breathtaking look at marriage and relationships, with 'the five families' †" the pleasantly hospitable Frosts, the brash and sexy Cleggs, flirtatious Jimmy Rose and aloof Star, maternal Vicky and reliable Gordon Ransome, Michael Wickham and his perfect wife Marcelle. Old friends, their lives are interwoven in a comfortable pattern of school runs and Sunday golf, barbecues and shared holidays.Until Nina Cort returns to the cathedral city of her childhood. Rich sophisticated and newly widowed, Nina is an exotic thread in the pattern, whose intrusion reveals a web of hidden flaws. In the course of a year from which none will emerge unscathed, the five families and Nina discover that you can never truly know the fabric of other people's marriages. Perhaps not even of your own…|Rosie Thomas is the author of numerous critically acclaimed, bestselling novels, and has twice won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award. Born in a small village in northern Wales, Thomas discovered a love of traveling and mountaineering when her children were grown. In the years since, she has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, and trekked in the footsteps of Shackleton on South Georgia Island.