For three girls growing up in the Fens in the tumultuous years between two world wars, the Winter House was a special place of refuge and friendship. Winter or summer, they would meet at the old wooden house by the waterside to confide all the secrets and heartaches of childhood and adolescence. There was Robin, idealistic and clever, destined for Cambridge; Maia, the most beautiful and ambitious of the three, looking for a rich husband; and quiet Helen, living under the seemingly benevolent tyranny of her widower father, the local vicar. Adulthood separates the three girls, and Robin, abandoning ideas of university, goes to London to work amongst the poor, meeting there her first great love, the handsome but brittle Francis. Maia's ideal marriage to a wealthy man ends in tragedy and Helen, meanwhile, kept in near-imprisonment by her obsessively protective father, has her very sanity threatened. Hugely satisfying, dramatic and romantic, The Winter House tells how these women find their way through a world changed for ever, through political and social upheaval, through the Spanish Civil War and to the brink of the Second World War. Set against a backdrop of London, Paris a