Absent Lives

When the Lusitania sinks in 1915, Anita loses her infant son and husband to grief and war. Decades later a young man, Charles, is given a package containing mysterious items by his dying grandfather, which spark a search across time and continents, uncovering a buried family secret.

A haunting tale of the ripples of war, the endurance of memory and the unbreakable threads of family.

1915. When the RMS Lusitania is torpedoed by a German U-boat off the Irish coast, young parents Anita and Elmore are torn from their happy lives. They survive, but amid the chaos their infant son, John, is lost. Grief drives Elmore to vengeance on the battlefields of France, where he is reported missing in action. Shattered and alone, Anita seeks solace across the Atlantic, carving out a fragile existence on her aunt’s Californian ranch and with the wealthy McKinneys in colonial Nassau, before finally settling in the shadows of New York’s skyline.

Scotland, 1960. Twenty-two-year-old Charles is summoned to his grandfather’s deathbed and handed a mysterious package containing a child’s jacket and a bracelet. As curiosity turns to obsession, Charles embarks on a journey that will span decades, unravel a half-century-old mystery and lead him to a woman whose story was almost lost to time.

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