The Secrets We Left Behind: A Novel

It was a summer of love, and a summer of secrets.

She has built a good life: a husband who adores her, a daughter she is fiercely proud of, a home with warmth and love at its heart. But things were not always so good, and the truth is that she has done things she can never admit.

Then one evening a phone call comes out of the blue. It is a voice from long ago, a man from a past that she has tried so hard to hide. He knows who she really is and what she has done. Now he is dying and he gives her an ultimatum: either she tells the truth, or he will.

And so we are taken back to that long hot summer of 1976 to a house by the sea on the southern coast of England, where her story begins and where the truth will be revealed. . . .

Told in dual narratives that jump back and forth in time, Elliot Wright has crafted a story with secrets that unfold through the very last page. Compelling, immersive, and thoroughly surprising, The Secrets We Left Behind is a stunning follow up to the author’s acclaimed UK debut The Things We Never Said.

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Susan Elliot Wright grew up in Lewisham in south-east London, left school at sixteen and married unwisely at eighteen. She didn't begin to pursue her childhood dream of writing until she left her unhappy marriage and went to university at the age of thirty. She has an MA in writing from Sheffield Hallam University, where she is now an associate lecturer.