READERS GUIDE

Questions and Topics for Discussion

INTRODUCTION
Eva Rice has crafted a captivating and wonderfully stylized novel about a young woman and her group of friends in postwar London’s glamorous and daring young society.

Vibrant, witty, and filled with vivid historical detail, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets is an utterly unique novel about a time and place just slipping into history.

This story is about what happened to me after I met Charlotte, and what happens when you say yes to everything, and how awkward it is when everyone falls in love with the wrong people.

It was a perfectly ordinary afternoon in November when I first met Charlotte. She straightaway invited me home to tea with Aunt Clare and Harry, and from that moment on, everything changed. At first I don’t think I knew it—after all, when I went to bed that night I was still living with my mother and brother in perpetual chaos in our crumbling ancestral estate, Magna—but the next day, I began to realize that for the first time ever, I had my own life.

You see, meeting Charlotte made everything possible. Even being kissed by Johnnie Ray and hanging out with movie producers called Rocky and believing my brother Inigo could be the next Elvis Presley. And falling in love and not realizing it.

This story is what happened when us war babies grew up and needed answers. When we got them, they weren’t what we expected at all.

Eva Rice is a writer and young mother living in London.

Acclaim:

“An impulsive taxi ride with a stranger in 1950s London indelibly changes Penelope Wallace’s life in Rice’s sparkling debut. . . . Rice’s remarkable gift for creating singular characters in this memorable story underscores her presence as a fresh new voice in fiction.”

—Publishers Weekly

“London of the 1950s comes to life . . . quickly becomes hard to put down as the reader becomes lost in the vivid description of 1950s London and [a] romantic world, where a chance meeting can change your life forever.”

—Library Journal