The french gardener: A neglected garden. A cottage that holds a secret. A mysterious and handsome Frenchman. Prepare to be “spellbound by the sheer charm" of Santa Montefiore’s tender and powerful novel about passion, loss, and the healing power of love.

Star gazing: Blind since birth, widowed in her twenties, now lonely in her forties, Marianne Fraser lives in Edinburgh in elegant, angry anonymity with her sister, Louisa, a successful novelist. Marianne's passionate nature finds solace and expression in music, a love she finds she shares with Keir, a man she encounters on her doorstep one winter's night. While Marianne has had her share of men attracted to her because they want to rescue her, Keir makes no concession to her condition. He is abrupt to the point of rudeness, and yet oddly kind. But can Marianne trust her feelings for this reclusive stranger who wants to take a blind woman to his island home on Skye, to "show" her the stars?

After river: Her idyllic teen years on a British Columbia dairy farm with her mother and brother irrevocably changed by the arrival of a draft dodger, Natalie Ward remembers years later the impact he had on the morals and beliefs of their community.