A Bluethroat Morning (Hardcover, Us ed.)

A literary mystery that explores the troubled relationship between women and their writing.
Alison Bliss, world-famous model and author of critically acclaimed "Sweet Susan," walks into the sea on a "bluethroat morning." She becomes a greater icon in death than in life and the Norfolk village of Glaven, where she spent her final days, is soon a place of pilgrimage.
Six years later, her husband Harry, a schoolteacher, is still haunted by her suicide and faithful to her memory-until he meets nineteen-year-old Helen. The two begin an intense affair which is secretly darkened by the past. Harry is attracted by Helen's uncanny resemblance to Arabella-his great-grandfather's second wife-on whom Alison was basing her new book. Little was known about Arabella, except that she had drowned herself in the sea by Glaven. . . where Alison had traveled, only to mysteriously follow in her tragic footsteps.
Propelled by their intense affair, Harry returns with Helen to the scene of his wife's death, determined to finally make his peace. There they meet ninety-year-old Erne Hingham who holds the key to both Arabella and Alison's stories. With the media circling, Harry discovers a story that has been generations in the making and in whose center may lie the reason for Alison's suicide. As he pieces together the past and confronts his own pain, Harry discovers that he must relive history to truly understand it.