Lily: A Tale of Revenge from the Sunday Times bestselling author

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but for this book, I reckon it was because the protagonist was ultimately so likable, driven by an inner strength to act justly for others. We work closely with publishers and authors to ensure that we offer the best books on the market for your child. I live not far from Norwich, but it’s very quiet; I look forward to going to London – and then I look forward to getting back!

But she could not turn down his invitation to his home, where he and his wife gave her a meal and, as there was heavy snow outside, a bed for the night. Trading Address (Warehouse) Unit E, Vulcan Business Complex, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EB. Lily has a quality I especially enjoy in a book of being simple and unpretentious yet profound and wise at the same time.

In places it reminded me much more of Sarah Waters’s novels such as Affinity and Fingersmith than of anything about else I’ve read about Coram hospital. Its founder and governors were kindly, god-fearing men; and wealthy women, like Lily’s benefactress, Lady Elizabeth Mortimer, helped to support such benevolent institutions. It is nearly three-quarters of the way through the book that we reach the grisly murder scene, though the readers must have guessed, long before that, whom she had killed. When Sam meets Lily again, there is an instant attraction between them and Lily is convinced that Sam holds the key to her happiness - but might he also be the one to uncover her crime and so condemn her to death?

There are many Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list such as Kingsley Amis, A S Byatt, J M Coetzee, Ismail Kadare, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Anne Enright, Iris Murdoch, Roddy Doyle and Ben Okri, to name a few. Along the way is Lily’s childhood friend Bridget, another desperately traumatised child who doesn’t get any sort of peaceful ending. The reader is always on her side and wills her to get away with it, but Lily knows it’s just a matter of time. Taken to the London Foundling hospital, she experiences abuse and cruelty, leading her to commit an avenging crime years later.Tremain, who is 78, has embraced several eras and territories across her best-selling works, earning numerous literary accolades (as well as her CBE, in 2007).

The blurb of this book sold it to me as a story of a young woman who gets into a romance with a policeman, after having murdered someone in her troubled past. But apart from my little memoir [she’s referring to her searingly candid 2018 work Rosie: Scenes From A Vanished Life], they wouldn’t find much of my life. She is an excellent central protagonist, she bears and wears the scars, she’s courageous in her rebelliousness at the orphan, she’s very brave, has a deep conscience and a long memory of that early love especially from Nellie. I imagined a very emotional journey but I had no idea just how emotional it would be and I underestimated greatly how I would feel. We meet the fascinating cast of characters who shape Lily's life, the policeman Sam Trench, the evil hospital nurse, and Belle Prettywood - the colourful businesswoman who becomes Lily's employer and friend.

Because of her sewing skills she finds herself at Belle Prettywood's Wig Emporium, where she finds favour. This experience would inform her 2005 short story ‘The Beauty Of The Dawn Shift’, about a former DDR watchtower guard who treks eastwards after the collapse of Communism, adrift “in a moral and an absolute sense”. A further cruel feature of the system is the way the foundlings are regarded as being the ‘carriers’ of the sins of their mothers – not their fathers, note.