This story centres around the Wilde family: Tony is a famous actor who is well known for his hospitality – and his affairs, his wife Althea is also an actress but is prepared to stay in his shadow, and their two children Ben and Cordelia. They spend their summers at a holiday house on the coast in Dorset, where the mistreated girl next door, Madeleine, becomes an extra member of their family.
Wow, what a spellbinding story - a family drama that flits back and forth in time between 1940 when war orphan Tony is taken under the wings of his colourful aunt Dinah, to 2015 when the house passes on to Cord, a singer who has damaged her beautiful voice. With plenty of family secrets being slowly revealed, it’s a long read – 500 pages plus – but well worth it.
The Wildflowers, by Harriet Evans, is about a family that is hiding decades of secrets. The summary says: "Tony and Althea Wilde. Glamorous, argumentative ... adulterous to the core.
They were my parents, actors known by everyone. They gave our lives love and colour in a house by the sea - the house that sheltered my orphaned father when he was a boy. But the summer Mads arrived changed everything. She too had been abandoned and my father understood why. We Wildflowers took her in.
My father was my hero, he gave us a golden childhood, but the past was always going to catch up with him ... it comes for us all, sooner or later. This is my story. I am Cordelia Wilde. A singer without a voice. A daughter without a father. Let me take you inside." The Wildflowers is out in February 2018.