Ballantine Reader's Circle
2 total works
The stained glass window in Penrose College is Augustus Penrose's legacy to the university he founded for the education of the daughters of the women who worked in his factory, the Rose Glass Works. Depicting his wife, Eugenie, as the Lady of Shallot, it's a mesmerising portrait that has come to embody the spirit of the school itself. But now, eighty years after it was created, the Lady Window, is due for restoration. The task falls to former alumna Juno McKay, who's restoring it in conjunction with her friend, Christine Webb, an art historian who is researching the window for her thesis. Christine seems to have discovered some new evidence that points to Eugenie's sister, Clare, being the subject for the Lady in the Window. But this is controversial, and before Christine can expound on her idea to Juno, she's found, dead, in the lake. But was she drowned, or was it something more sinister? What other legacies have the Penroses bequeathed to the students at their college?
Many years ago, Iris Greenfeder's mother disappeared. They were living at Hotel Equinox where Iris's father was the manager and where Iris's mother wrote delicate, powerful fantasies. Then she took a train and never returned, dying in a hotel fire in Brooklyn where she was registered as another man's wife. Returning to Hotel Equinox, now a struggling academic, Iris needs to find the truth about her mother; some keys are held in those fantastical writings and others in the memories of those who knew her. Kay Greenfeder, it seems, was a woman without a past. But as Iris begins to untangle the secrets of years before, she realises that the past was very different to what she had believed, and much more dangerous...