Frances Osborne – författare

Idina Sackville - the 1920''s style icon and seductress who ''Taylor Swift fans think "The Bolter" could be inspired by'' Bustle

In 1934 Idina Sackville met the son she had last seen fifteen years earlier when she shocked high society by running off to Africa with a near-penniless man, abandoning him, his brother and their father. So scandalous was Idina''s life - she was said to have had ''lovers without number'' - that it was kept a secret from her great-granddaughter, Frances Osborne. Now Osborne explores her moving tale of betrayal and heartbreak.

''A corker of a subject... probably inspired The Bolter in Nancy Mitford''s The Pursuit of Love... A breakneck-paced, thoroughly diverting story'' THE TIMES

''A tragic and deeply moving tale... far more gripping than any novel I have read for years'' ANTONY BEEVOR

''Frances Osborne has brilliantly captured not only one woman''s life but an entire lost society'' AMANDA FOREMAN

''An enthralling account of a dazzling, troubled life'' JULIAN FELLOWES

London, 1914. Two young women dream of breaking free from tradition and obligation; they know that suffragettes are on the march and that war looms, but at 35 Park Lane, Lady Masters, head of a dying industrial dynasty, insists that life is about service and duty.Below stairs, housemaid Grace Campbell is struggling. Her family in Carlisle believes she is a high earning secretary, but she has barely managed to get work in service - something she keeps even from her adored brother. Asked to send home more money than she earns, Grace is in trouble.As third housemaid she waits on Miss Beatrice, the youngest daughter of the house, who, fatigued with the social season, is increasingly drawn into Mrs Pankhurst''s captivating underground world of militant suffragettes. Soon Bea is playing a dangerous game that will throw her in the path of a man her mother wouldn''t let through the front door.Then war comes and it is not just their secrets - now on a collision course - that will change their lives for good.Brilliantly capturing a deeply fascinating period of British life in which the normal boundaries of behaviour were overturned and the social hierarchy could no longer be taken for granted, Park Lane is as gripping and intense as Frances Osborne''s number one bestselling The Bolter.