The House of Lost Secrets

She thought she knew her best friend…She was wrong.

The weatherworn cottage Clachan has always been Jo Wilding’s sanctuary, a blissful escape from her tumultuous home life. From the first summer Rachel invited her to join the Willoughby family in the wilds of Scotland, she fell in love with the sea air, sandy beach and Tristan, Rachel’s older brother…

All these years later, Clachan is where their most important occasions and conversations take place, so when Rachel organises a weekend there, Jo never suspects that this weekend will change everything. Because it turns out Rachel has been keeping a secret, a betrayal that plunges Jo into a past she’s spent years trying to forget.

Left to untangle the pieces of their past alone, Jo has to decide if there is such a thing as forgiveness when there is no one left to forgive?

Anstey Harris was born in an unmarried mothers’ home in Liverpool in 1965. Now a mother and stepmother herself, she lives in Scotland. She has been inspired by her family history, and hopes to give a voice to the women and children―16,000 a year during the 1960s in the UK―separated from each other by forced adoptions.

Anstey won the H. G. Wells Short Story Award in 2015 and her debut novel, The Truths and Triumphs of Grace Atherton, a Richard and Judy Book Club choice, won the Sapere Books RNA Popular Romantic Fiction Award in 2020. Her second novel, Where We Belong, was shortlisted for the RNA Book of the Year Award 2021 and she numbers Libby Page, Katie Fforde and Beth O’Leary among her many fans.