From the Heart

You're a young woman. You can choose. Which career to pursue. Who to have sex with. Who to marry and have children - or not - with. This is now. Step into the shoes of Olive. You're a happy, open-hearted girl. Your (tricky) mother is dead and you live with your father in a solid, Edwardian house with apple trees in the garden. Your passion for books gets you easily into university, where the world is surely waiting for you. There, you meet a boy. But then you make a mistake - the kind any one of us could make - and face an impossible choice. You are young, still, and full of hope. You can't possibly know how that mistake will sit in your heart. You won't know that when you get a job at a school you will fall in love with an older colleague. But the affair must stay secret; the world won't have it any other way. All you have ever wanted is for your heart to be free. But you are living in a time and place where freedoms we now take for granted had the power to destroy. Yorkshire-born writer Susan Hill’s writing career has been as wide-ranging as it has been phenomenally successful, encompassing literary fiction, crime novels, plays, ghost stories, children’s books and memoirs. As well as being one of the world’s bestselling novelists, her work has attracted extensive critical acclaim having won the Whitbread, Somerset Maugham and John Llewelyn Rhys awards, as well as having been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her best-known works include: The Woman in Black, The Mist in the Mirror, The Travelling Bag, The Small Hand, I’m the King of the Castle, Strange Meeting, Mrs De Winter, In the Springtime of the Year, Howards End is on the Landing and the Simon Serrailler crime series.Read a Waterstones exclusive interview with Susan Hill in which she discusses the inspiration for From the Heart and a lifetime of writing about love and grief.