Alys Always

A taut, suspenseful, assured literary debut that explores the dark side of desire and ambition through one woman’s calculated entry into an elite world and a destiny of her own design.On a bitter winter’s night, a young woman named Frances comes upon the aftermath of a car crash and, while comforting the dying driver, Alys Kyte, hears her final words. The wife of a famous English novelist, Alys moved in rarified circles, and Frances at first resists the Kyte family’s requests to meet her. When she finally agrees, she gets a glimpse of a world entirely foreign to cultured, wealthy, and privileged. She strikes up a friendship with Alys’s daughter, the exuberant and slightly wild Polly, and as the months go by Frances’s life takes a dramatic turnâ one that propels her from a mundane life as an anonymous assistant editor for the books section of a newspaper to the dizzying heights of literary society. With her unforgettable protagonist, author Harriet Lane draws readers inexorably into a tightly paced tale that careens towards an audacious ending. Transfixing, insightful, and unsettling, Alys, Always drops us into the mind of a young woman whose seductive and enigmatic voice exposes a glamorous world and those on the outside who would risk all to become a part of it.