Across The Common

One secret can tear a family apart…

Sensing the end of her marriage, Louise Yeovil takes the initiative and leaves her husband.

Twelve years ago and madly in love, she’d eloped with Max Yeovil, much to her family’s disbelief.

Life with Max had been good, but it had its challenges.

A series of miscarriages and Max’s eccentric, never-ending, stream of friends and colleagues filtering into their lives, had left Louise unable to cope with the path she’d chosen.

But she knew there was more to it than just that.

Returning to her home, The Hollies, the house she’d grown up in, Louise believes she will find the answer to some of her niggling thoughts.

Nothing much has changed in the twelve years she’s been away.

There is Aunt Seraphina, who steals cuttings from under the park-keepers’ noses; Aunt Rosa, the eldest, who has the ability to hurl a cushion as straight as a die, with her one eye; and Aunt Cissie in her wheelchair, tiny and malevolent

An unexpected turn of events results in Louise learning of troubles that had been kept secret from her and she makes it her mission to unearth the truth from her ever-cunning aunts.

But how can she find out more about the secret she revealed?

A chance encounter with someone from her childhood leads Louise to The Common, just outside their garden gates.

The Common had always been a place that attracted danger, of one sort or another; a place her aunts had always warned her about as a child.

But how was it connected to the secrets her aunts had kept from her all these years?

Louise needed to find out what happened… at whatever cost!

Elizabeth Berridge (December 1919 – December 2009) was a novelist and critic. Born in London, where she was partly educated here, she later moved to Geneva. Berridge won the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award, in 1964 for Across The Common.