AustLit

'Two young lovers, Catherine and Jonathan, have trespassed into the rose garden of Burnt Norton, an abandoned gracious home in the English countryside. Hearing people coming, they hide, and witness the celebrated poet TS ('Tom') Eliot and his close friend Emily Hale enter the rose garden and bury a small tobacco tin together.

'Tom and Emily knew each other in America in their youth; now middle-aged, they have come together again. But Tom is married, and his wife has no intention of letting him go. What is it that binds Tom and Emily together? What happens when the muse steps out of the shadows?

'In the enclosed world of an English village one autumn, their story becomes entwined with that of Catherine and Jonathan, who are young, certain in their newfound love, and each full of promise.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Why do some nights feel as though they were always waiting to happen? Or have already happened and will again? And why don't we know it then? Why is it only afterwards we say, yes, that was when my life turned?'

'1965. The great poet, TS Eliot, is dead. Hearing the news, the seventy-two year old Emily Hale points her Ford Roadster towards the port of Gloucester, where a fishing boat will take her out to sea, near the low, treacherous rocks called the Dry Salvages, just off Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Over the course of that day, clutching a satchel of letters, Emily Hale slips between past and present, reliving her life with Eliot – starting with that night in 1913, the moment when her life turned, when the young Tom Eliot and Emily Hale fell deeply in love with each other. But Tom moved to London to fulfil his destiny as the famous poet ‘TS Eliot', and Emily went on to become his muse – the silent figure behind some of the greatest poetry of the 20th century – his friend and his confidante. But never did she become his lover or his wife.' (Publication Summary)