A lost sketchbook. A love story buried for more than a century.
And one final secret waiting to be uncovered.
When Sorrel Penrose is given a DNA test for her fortieth birthday, she has no idea that the results will lead her deep into the past and towards a mystery that has lain hidden for generations.
At its heart is an old sketchbook.
Its pages hold fragments of another world: Edwardian Cornwall, a great house overlooking the sea and lives changed for ever by the First World War.
But some stories refuse to stay in the past.
Set between Cornwall in the early twentieth century and the present day, The Sketchbook is a story of family, memory, love and belonging, and the final novel in the Rosecraddick series.
The landscape behind the story
One of the things I realised while writing The Sketchbook was how much I draw on places I know and love, often without even meaning to.
A river I've walked beside for years becomes another river in the book. An old house stays somewhere in the back of my mind and eventually reappears, altered and renamed, as someone else's home. Farms, churches, woodland and forgotten tracks all find their way into the story.
The Cornwall of The Sketchbook is fictional, but its roots run deep into the real landscape around me.
The house that never existed
At the heart of The Sketchbook stands Trevellyn House, a great Cornish house shaped by several of the places I have visited, researched and loved over the years.
I didn't want to recreate any one house exactly. Instead, I borrowed impressions: a sweep of parkland, an ancient room, a glimpse through a window, a gatehouse, a garden path and the particular feeling of a house that has watched generations come and go.
Gradually, Trevellyn became a place in its own right.
That's one of my favourite parts of writing historical fiction.
When family history becomes fiction
One of the threads running through The Sketchbook began much closer to home.
My niece Faith has a passion for genealogy and has spent years uncovering stories hidden in our own family tree. Listening to her discoveries made me think about the extraordinary things we can now learn about people who lived generations before us, and how DNA can suddenly connect us to a past we thought was lost.
That fascination found its way into the novel.
In the present-day story, a DNA test becomes the first tiny thread in a mystery reaching back more than a century. As Sorrel begins to follow it, the past starts to feel much closer than she ever imagined.
New to Rosecraddick?
While you're waiting for The Sketchbook, you can begin the story with The Letter, the first Rosecraddick novel.
A forgotten letter. A Cornish house filled with secrets. And a love story that refuses to be forgotten.
START WITH THE LETTER