I weep for Charlotte. Harman has given a rounded picture of an extraordinary, intelligent, spirited and flawed woman whose faith sustained her through terrible, endless trials, and who, with her sisters, wrote some of the world's most beloved novels.

Though only two parts of the suite were finished before the author was taken from her family and killed in a concentration camp in 1942, the scale of this novel is still so grand. The setting is breathtakingly beautiful, the reactions to German occupation are raw, shocking, tender, brutal and real.