The Dividing Sea

Four independent-minded sisters come of age in the early 1900s - and four interwoven novels tell their stories, each through a different sister's eyes.

The year is 1910, and the four Purcell sisters have only each other. Their mother has died, leaving them orphans in a rambling country estate. But with the help of the Mackenzies - their guardian and his family, whom the sisters come to love in very different ways - Sarah, Frances, Julia, and Gwen find the courage to follow their own paths in a world that is rapidly changing.
Avid readers and fans of historical-fiction classics will love these spirited heroines - named "the Little Women of our times" by the TIMES of London - and will be thoroughly absorbed by their intertwining tales, full of feistiness, creativity, and young romance.

The Dividing Sea (Book Three) is Julia's story. It tells of her eventful time as a volunteer nurse in France during the Great War and her ill-started love story with Geoffrey Mackenzie.

Ruth Elwin Harris has lived abroad at different times during her life. She spent three years in the USA before her marriage, working in jobs as diverse as secretary, sailing instructor and stage manager for a theatre company, and at one time helped out at an orphanage in India run by Mother Theresa's nuns. Ruth has written many stories for magazines and radio and is the author of Billie: The Nevill Letters, 1914-1916, a moving collection of World War I letters that she came across in the Imperial War Museum while researching the background for The Dividing Sea. Ruth now lives with her family in North Yorkshire.