The Rebecca Landon Novels Series

A woman searches for a fresh start on a remote Caribbean island in this  sequel to Rosamond Lehmann’s classic The Ballad and the Source The year is 1933. After a heart-wrenching betrayal by her married lover, Rebecca Landon leaves London for a tiny island in the Caribbean. There, she meets a colony of expatriates, including the voluble Captain Cunningham and his wife, Ellie, who were the first white settlers on the isle. She also meets Johnny, a married former pilot who was crippled in the war and now lives as a recluse. Drawn together by their mutual pain and sorrow, he and Rebecca are soon swept into a passionate affair.   But there’s yet another presence on the island: the spirit of Sibyl Jardine, a scandalous beauty who fascinated Rebecca as a child and has left an unforgettable mark on the woman Rebecca has become. Mrs. Jardine also came to this remote island to escape, and before she died, she forged a powerful connection with Johnny. Does her ghost still cast a shadow over the island’s inhabitants? What is her unfinished business and what is she trying to communicate to Rebecca and Johnny? Or is it Rebecca who is trying to communicate something, driven by her own need for closure?   This is a poignant, uplifting novel about the lives we leave behind, our eternal quest for love, and the answers we seek when our faith is shaken.

The New York Times–bestselling “masterpiece” and its haunting sequel, from a British novelist of “visceral power” (Jonathan Coe, The Guardian).   “A novelist in the grand tradition,” New York Times–bestselling author Rosamond Lehmann wrote moving and memorable stories about the inner emotional lives of British girls and women (Anita Brookner). Jonathan Coe noted that Lehmann “has every quality that a great writer should possess . . . [including] an astonishing, unembarrassed emotionality that gives visceral power to her recurring themes—thwarted love, faithlessness, the unbearable sadness of naïve romantic feelings being crushed by the passage of time.”   Those themes are explored through the character of Rebecca Landon, who appears as an innocent girl in Lehmann’s bestselling The Ballad and the Source, and as an emotionally wounded woman in her sequel, A Sea-Grape Tree, written over thirty years later.   The Ballad and the Source: In this New York Times bestseller, when the former best friend of Rebecca Landon’s grandmother returns home to England, the ten-year-old girl is enchanted by the elderly woman’s magnetic personality and shockingly blunt manner. Rebecca comes to learn that Sibyl Jardine left her husband for another man decades ago, becoming estranged from her daughter and never seeing her grandchildren . . . until now. Set during the First World War, this “haunting book, expertly handled” follows Rebecca’s journey into adolescence and her evolving awareness of the complexity of human behavior and emotions through her friendship with Sibyl (Kirkus Reviews).   “[Lehmann] broods delicately and beautifully over the past, turning the gaze inward.” —The New York Times   A Sea-Grape Tree: In this lyrical sequel set in 1933, an adult Rebecca has fled to an island in the Caribbean, after a heart-wrenching betrayal by her married lover. There, she meets a colony of expatriates, including a former pilot who was crippled in the war and now lives as a recluse, with whom she begins an affair. But there’s yet another presence on the island—the spirit of the complex woman who fascinated Rebecca as a child: Sibyl Jardine.   “Full of her sensibility, her funniness, her own particular acumen. It is also beautifully written and devised.” —Elizabeth Jane Howard

A young girl befriends an elderly woman during the First World War in this remarkable novel by one of Britain’s best-loved authors Sibyl Jardine, the former best friend of Rebecca Landon’s grandmother, has recently returned to the Priory, her home at the top of a hill. Rebecca is instantly drawn in by Sibyl’s magnetic personality and blunt, shocking manner. Decades earlier, Sibyl had left her husband Charles for another man and, as a result, lost her daughter Ianthe. Now she is finally about to meet her three grandchildren, who will become an integral part of Rebecca’s life as she journeys into adolescence.   At the heart of this extraordinary novel is the enigma that is Sibyl Jardine: Is she a saint or a sinner? Is she a duplicitous lover or a woman who has been unjustly punished? Played out in a series of conversations between Rebecca, Sibyl Jardine, Jardine’s granddaughter Maisie, and a Cockney maid named Tilly, The Ballad and the Source is a tale of perception and memory, passion and betrayal, and the fearsome power of a mother’s love.