The Time Traveller’s Wife meets I Capture the Castle in this sweeping love story with a time travel (and bookish!) edge.
THE LOST MASTERPIECE
by Lou Morgan
Penguin Michael Joseph, publication date TBC
(via Mushens Entertainment)
When Jess – grieving the loss of her brother – returns to her family home she is alarmed to find a man living in the tower room. Solomon Nash has been stuck there for 150 years, unable to finish his novel. Determined to help set him free – and to unravel the mystery of what her brother intended to tell her before his accident – she doesn’t expect Solomon to unlock a part of her no one else has. But how can she fall in love with someone who doesn’t belong to this time?
The Grant family have been caretakers of Merrith, the house of famed Victorian poet Hercules Nash, for 150 years. Everyone assumed that her brother Toby would be the one to inherit the house, which is full of old books, memories, and family history. But then Toby died, and the Nash Foundation decide to sell it, meaning that Jess is forced back to confront her complex emotions around the property and her family. Jess is lonely, very aware that Toby was the family favourite, and haunted by a mysterious message from her brother before he died.
One day, convinced that she sees someone through a tower window, she visits a room she has never entered before. Defying all reason, she discovers it’s a pocket of time: it’s always 1853 in that room, and Hercules Nash’s younger brother, Solomon, is stuck there, unable to finish his novel. It’s impossible, he’s impossible, but the more time she spends with him, the more he starts to bring her back to life. She wants to help him return to his own time, and to find out exactly why he has been erased from Hercules Nash’s history. But she’s also falling in love. Torn between helping to save him, and wanting to find a way to be with him – and with the ticking clock of the house sale on the horizon – Jess finds herself torn between her heart and her head, and utterly changed by the experience of loving him.
Since 2018 Lou Morgan he has been a regular writer for Big Finish Productions across some of their most popular Doctor Who full cast audio ranges, writing for actors including Sir Derek Jacobi, Michelle Gomez and Richard Armitage. After publishing two urban fantasy novels with Solaris in 2012, she then turned her hand to YA, where she published six novels, with four contemporary romances under the pseudonym Maggie Harcourt. Born in Wales and a graduate of University College London, she now lives in Bath with her family.

A secret love story.