Elise: 1

What dark secrets could a harmless old lady possibly know?

Elise Morgan is nearly ninety years old. She loves her family, the sea, and night-time walks. She hates gossip, and bullies, and being called 'sweet', or treated like she's stupid, or boring (and sometimes like she's deaf), just because she has lived a long time.

Elise was sent to an all-girls' school, which was evacuated to Cornwall in the Second World War. She never left the county. She is an orphan, a mother, a grandmother, and a widow. Since her children moved away and her best friend died, life has seemed increasingly empty.

These days, she spends a lot of time sitting at her window, looking out at the world, as if nothing ever happens, and nothing ever has. To passers-by, she might seem just an old lady, but of course there is no such thing.

There was once a time when she lived a lot... and there are things she has never forgotten...

Elise is the first book in the Connections series: a group of stories whose protagonists' lives are inescapably interwoven, in the Cornish town they call home.