Consider the Lily

Winner of the 1994 Romantic Novelists' Association Novel of the Year Award, Consider the Lily is now republished for a new generation of readers.

When a choice must be made between love and duty, solace comes in unexpected forms...

Summer, 1929. The Hinton Dysart estate is dying from lack of money, and Kit Dysart, the heir, sees no way out. Then, at his sister's wedding, he meets the vibrant Daisy Chudleigh and her cousin, the heiress Matty Verrall. In love with Daisy but troubled by his family's decline, Kit chooses to marry Matty, though neither Kit nor Daisy is able to forget the other. When Matty, growing increasingly unhappy in her troubled, empty marriage, decides to re-create the estate's garden, she discovers solace and a gift of which she never dreamed.

A haunting, passionate story played out between three people, Consider the Lily is also a poignant and beautiful novel of England between the wars that propels the reader into its own rich and nostalgic world.

Elizabeth Buchan was a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full time. Her novels include the prize-winning Consider the Lily (Romantic Novel of the Year from Romantic Novelists' Association), international bestseller Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, The Good Wife Strikes Back, and Everything She Thought She Wanted. Buchan's short stories are broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in magazines. She has reviewed for the Sunday Times, The Times and the Daily Mail, and has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes.