A sweeping love story set in occupied France in 1944 where an art-forger is blackmailed by the British government into looking into the loyalties of a French priest, rumoured to be a collaborator. For fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Kate Morton and Letters to the Lost.
THE HIDDEN HEART
by Theresa Howes
on submission
(via Mushens Entertainment)
1944. Marguerite Segal, an artist living under a false identity on the Cote d’Azur to escape her criminal past, is blackmailed by British Intelligence into befriending Father Etienne Valade, a local priest suspected of being an Nazi collaborator. Her mission is to persuade him to pass on information from the high ranking German officers who attend his church. Connected by a passion for art, they soon fall in love. As she tries to convince him to pass on information learned in the confessional box, her association with him increasingly puts her in danger of violent reprisals from the local people. At the same time, her covert work, creating false identity cards to camouflage those hiding from the Third Reich, brings her under the scrutiny of the occupying enemy.
As the Allied invasion draws closer, Marguerite has to work out who she can trust in a world where everything is at stake. Should she put her faith in the man she loves, without knowing the motivation behind his actions? Or by trusting a man so full of contradictions, will she be aligning her fate with that of a man whose heart she cannot know?
Theresa Howes lives in London, and has a background as an actor. Her work has been long-listed for the Mslexia Novel Award, the Bath Novel Award, The Caledonia Novel Award, The Lucy Cavendish College Prize, and the BBC National Short Story Award. Theresa is already working on her second novel: at the end of WWII, a female war reporter who was used as a honey trap by British Intelligence during the war is trying to rebuild her marriage until the high ranking British officer she exposed as traitor reappears in her life, determined to get his revenge.
Best friends Efe and Sam meet as teenagers in 90s London. Efe is a new arrival in the UK from Ghana, sinking under the weight of her parents’ expectations. Sam is focused and idealistic, taking his first steps towards a career in corporate law. Over the years that follow the best friends become lovers, then marry. But an unplanned pregnancy forces them to confront just how radically different they want their lives to be. Soon Efe is swallowed up by the demands of motherhood, the dreams for her life dangling from a thread. And when she leaves, disappearing one morning and leaving both Sam and their daughter behind, Sam’s illusion of their perfect marriage crumbles. He’s about to discover exactly who he’s married to and the lengths he’ll go to win her back. 
Doom Thorax is destined for greatness! Well, maybe…His dad is, after all, the fiercest apocalyptic warrior to ever walk what’s left of the earth. Unfortunately, in a world where the remaining humans (if you can still call them that) all have extraordinary abilities, Doom is painfully ordinary. In fact, the only thing even remotely special about him is that he is the one person in their whole pack who can read.
All those memories. A man on his knees. The dark burn of Coke washing down a yellow wall. The night someone strung dead bats along the school fence, their black leather wings shredded into streamers. I never want to revisit that life.
Five years ago, Nora Wilder disappeared. The oldest of her two daughters, Zadie, should have seen it coming, because she can literally see things coming. But not even her psychic abilities were able to prevent their mother from vanishing one morning, never to return.