Before The Dawn

Front Cover
Pan Macmillan, Feb 14, 2013 - Fiction - 296 pages

Happily married to Maxime and living in the South of France, Katharine’s life seems perfect until the birth of her fourth child. Struggling to come out of a deep post-natal depression, the security of her world collapses when Maxime’s first wife unexpectedly reappears. Shattered, threatened, and pre-occupied by her baby, Katharine feels she can no longer cope, though Maxime, against all odds, fights to keep their marriage together.

Katharine’s trauma overwhelms her when she hears that her father has mysteriously disappeared. Will she see him again? Can her marriage survive?

Before the Dawn is a fast-moving, dramatic and passionate book set in France, Scotland and North Africa, in which the drama of Katharine and Maxime’s marriage unfolds . . .

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About the author (2013)

Noreen Riols was born in Malta where her father was serving in the Royal Navy, and educated at the French Lycée in London. From 1943-45 she served in SOE (Churchill's Secret Army) and post-war worked for the World Service of the BBC where she met her journalist husband, recently demobilised from the 1st French Army. After 6 months behind the Iron Curtain in Bucharest in the early fifties, they settled in Versailles where their five children were raised. For nine years she worked freelance from Paris for "Woman's Hour" while writing for many newspapers and magazines and MacMillan has just bought her eleventh book: "They shall not grow old".

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