Monarch's Row: A Novel

From the bestselling author of Broken for You, an exhilarating new novel about a child born into the world of the British Raj and raised largely in seclusion, until an act of violence catapults her into the world—a wartime love triangle, a literary puzzle, and a moving exploration of the power of authorship, for readers of All the Light We Cannot See and A Gentleman in Moscow. Enid Asquith is born in 1901 into a prominent British family living in Bombay; her congenital facial deformity and her mother’s frail health requires the family to abandon their holdings in India and return to their home in Muswell Hill—a suburb of North London. For her first few years, Enid shares a housebound existence with her chronically ill mother and a distant father; however, possessed of a resilient, curious, and imaginative nature, she experiences no sense of deprivation: a voracious reader, she is never without the company of imaginary friends, and on occasion, visits from her much-older sister and brother who are away at boarding school. Soon after the sudden death of her mother, Enid is finally able to undergo reparative surgery, and her world begins to open up. But then in 1913, a series of unspeakable events upends life at Muswell House and sends her back into isolation. When we meet E.M. Joshi, the author of a beloved children’s book series, more than a decade has passed. Joshi is traveling by train from Scotland to London to meet with her publishers to discuss her first book for adults, a wartime novel. Titled The Timid Heart, the novel is a loose retelling of the Cyrano de Bergerac story, set during the Great War, and while on her journey, the author shares the manuscript with a fellow traveler, the mother of a young man who is suffering from the invisible injuries he sustained in that very war. This reader’s feedback will change both the shape of the novel in question, and the course of its author’s life. Taking us from colonial India to a north London estate, from the trenches of World War I to a military hospital in the English countryside, from a seat on the Flying Scotsman to the corridors of a storied London publishing house, Monarch’s Row is a gloriously inventive work of historical fiction and a powerful testament to the resilience of the human heart.