The Story She Left BehindThe Story She Left Behind

"In 1927, in Bluffton South Carolina, a famous American child-prodigy author called Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham disappears, abandoning her eight-year-old daughter and husband. She leaves behind a sequel to her children's fantasy blockbuster about a young girl named Emjie who is caught between worlds. But the sequel is written in the author's secret and untranslatable created-language. Now in 1952, those "lost words" of Bronwyn have been discovered in a private library in England by a man called Charlie Jameson. Bronwyn's daughter, a children's book illustrator and divorced mother of one, Clara Harrington, goes on a quest to England to retrieve the lost words of her mother, words she believes will translate the sequel and help her discover what happened and why her mother abandoned her. Clara takes along her own eight-year-old precocious, funny, and wise daughter, Wynnie, who has an imaginary friend called Emjie (from her lost Grandmother's novel). Together mother and daughter embark on a quest to translate Bronwyn's last work and possibly discover not only Emjie's fate but also Bronwyn's. December 1952: Clara and Wynnie sail to England and arrive during one of London's greatest natural disasters -- the Great Smog. Wynnie is a fragile child with asthma and the air is deadly. When Charlie Jameson helps them escape London and make their way to his family's country home in the Lake District, the tale unfolds in the wild and glorious landscape of Esthwaite Water and the land of Beatrix Potter. It is there that the tangled roots that tie Charlie and Clara together are revealed and the mystery of Bronwyn's fate is made manifest."-- Provided by publisher.