Maisie suspects Hugo as the culprit and proceeds to blackmail him with information about the fate of her husband. In a melodramatic turn-like many here, laid on with a trowel, but with little evocation of time and place-someone burns Maisie’s tearoom to the ground.

Eager to see Harry on to Oxford, Maisie opens a tearoom with great success. At school, Harry befriends the loyal Giles Barrington, the son of wealthy Hugo Barrington, who, for reasons apparent to everyone but Harry, remains aloof, uneasy and guarded around Harry, especially when, a few years later, Harry takes an interest in Hugo’s attractive daughter Emma. His mother, of little means but great determination, thus resolves to enroll him in public school where he will receive a strong education. At the age of 12, Harry demonstrates a keen mind and sings with a rare quality. His subsequent story spins out in a series of overlapping narratives that lead to a great deal of overlapping details, otherwise known as padding. And so the subsequent birth of her son Harry raises the first of many questions readers will have little difficulty guessing in advance: Who is Harry’s actual father? Harry is told his father died in the Great War, but he’s skeptical. It’s 1919, and a young woman named Maisie, on a day’s holiday in Weston-super-Mare, England, determines to lose her virginity while her future husband spends the afternoon at a pub. A dock worker in Bristol, Harry never knew his father and expects to continue on at the shipyard, until a remarkable gift wins him a scholarship to an exclusive boys' school, and his life will never be the same again.Īs Harry enters into adulthood, he finally learns how his father really died, but the awful truth only leads him to question: Was he even his father? Is he the son of Arthur Clifton, a stevedore, or the firstborn son of a scion of West Country society, whose family owns a shipping line? From the ravages of the Great War and the docks of working-class England to the streets of 1940 New York City and the outbreak of the Second World War, this is a powerful journey that will bring to life one hundred years of history to reveal a family story that neither the reader nor Harry Clifton himself could ever have imagined.The first book in a new series, a family saga called The Clifton Chronicles, slated to cover 100 years. The epic tale of Harry Clifton's life begins in 1920, with the words I was told that my father was killed in the war. The first novel in the Clifton Chronicles, an ambitious new series that tells the story of a family across generations and oceans, from heartbreak to triumph, from #1

Only Time Will Tell by Jeffrey Archer