Finally, I owe a special debt to my parents, Mr and Mrs Winston Taylor of Leeds, for their encouragement and dedication to my project. They also spent many months seeking out old books and newspapers, and their vivid recollections of Yorkshire in the early 1900s provide much of the background for this novel. And my gratitude to my husband for his understanding and belief.

New York, 1979

Quotation from ‘The Poems of Yurii Zhivago’, Hamlet, from Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, translated by Max Haywood and Manya Harari. Copyright © 1958. Reprinted by permission of William Collins Sons and Company Limited.

About the Author

Barbara Taylor Bradford was born in Leeds, and by the age of twenty was an editor and columnist on Fleet Street. Her first novel, A Woman of Substance, became an enduring bestseller and was followed by eighteen others, most recently Emma’s Secret. Her books have sold more than seventy million copies worldwide in more than ninety countries and forty languages. She lives in New York City with her husband, producer Robert Bradford.