The French Guesthouse

Sometimes the only way to rebuild is to face the past you tried to escape…

On the night Fliss loses everything – her beloved hotel ravaged by fire and fiance exposed as a cheat – she receives devastating news: her estranged mother has died. They hadn’t spoken in fifteen years and Fliss has stayed away for her own self-preservation.

Summoned to a dilapidated guesthouse in France for the reading of the will, Fliss is stunned to discover she has been left all her mother’s possessions. But the inheritance comes at a price – both literal and emotional. Sharing the house is Etienne, her mother’s grief-stricken, wine-soaked partner, and his guarded yet magnetic nephew, Benoit.

As Fliss begins restoring the guesthouse, she unearths long-buried secrets about her mother, their past and the true cost of her long absence. But to move forward, cure her guilt and claim the love and happiness she’s never thought she deserves, Fliss must first reckon with the hardest question of all: can she forgive?

A deeply poignant, richly compelling novel of complex relationships, generational trauma and our capacity to forgive, from the acclaimed author of The Summer Trip.

Author Biography

Isabelle Broom was born in Cambridge nine days before the 1980s began and studied Media Arts at university in London before a 12-year stint at Heat magazine. When she is not travelling all over the world seeking out settings for her escapist novels, Isabelle can mostly be found in Suffolk, where she shares a home with her two dogs and more books than she could ever hope to read in a lifetime.