The Novel In The Viola

When they started coming for people like us, I was forced to swap my life of champagne and glittering parties in bohemian Vienna for the cap and apron of a parlour maid in a country house on the Dorset coast.

I knew nothing about England, except that I wouldn't like it. But then, clutching a copy of Mrs Beeton's Household Management that I could barely read, I saw Tyneford for the first time. That great house on the bay, where servants polished the silver and served drinks on the lawn, where Kit caused an outrage by dancing with me, where Mr Rivers read the letter on the beach that changed everything.

And now the house and that world is gone. All that remains is my story of the sea, of love lost and found, and of a novel hidden inside a viola.