The songbird / Marcia Willett.

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Bantam Press.

Can new hopes bloom when summer begins again? When Mattie invites her old friend Tim to stay in one of her family cottages on the edge of Dartmoor, she senses there is something he is not telling her. But as he gets to know the rest of the warm jumble of family by the moor, Tim begins to relax again and he discovers that everyone there has their own secrets. There is Kat, a retired ballet dancer who longs for the stage again; Charlotte, a young navy wife struggling to bring up her son while her husband is at sea; William, who guards a dark past he cannot share with the others; and Mattie who has loved Tim in silence for years. As Tim begins to open up, Mattie falls deeper in love. And as summer warms the wild Dartmoor landscape, new hopes begin to bloom. If you like books by Lucy Diamond, Trisha Ashley and Carole Matthews, you'll love Marcia Willett's gloriously warm novels set in the West Country.