Full of her trademark mix of unforgettable characters and heart-breaking secrets, The Butterfly Room is a spellbinding, second-chance-at-love story from #1 International bestseller Lucinda Riley.

Posy Montague is approaching her seventieth birthday. Still living in her beautiful family home, Admiral House, set in the glorious Suffolk countryside where she spent her own idyllic childhood catching butterflies with her beloved father, and raised her own children, Posy knows she must make an agonizing decision. Despite the memories the house holds, and the exquisite garden she has spent twenty-five years creating, the house is crumbling around her, and Posy knows the time has come to sell it.

Then a face appears from the past – Freddie, her first love, who abandoned her and left her heartbroken fifty years ago. Already struggling to cope with her son Sam’s inept business dealings, and the sudden reappearance of her younger son Nick after ten years in Australia, Posy is reluctant to trust in Freddie’s renewed affection. And unbeknown to Posy, Freddie – and Admiral House – have a devastating secret to reveal…

Book Type:

Second-Chance Romance

Excerpt: The Butterfly Room

As I began to get to know my fellow students in the weeks that followed, I started to feel more and more that I was no longer a fish out of water, that for the first time in my life I actually belonged. Every girl I met was frighteningly bright and – more to the point – they were all here simply because they were passionate about their subjects. As the nights drew in, conversations around the fire in the comfortable common room ranged from pure mathematics to the poetry of Yeats and Brooke. We lived and dreamed our chosen subjects, and, perhaps because of the fact we all knew how lucky we were to be here, there were few complaints when it came to the heavy workload we were given. I thrived on it, and still had to pinch myself every time I walked through the door of the Botany School.

The building was very unprepossessing, being a square, many-windowed building on Downing Street, but at least it was only a short bicycle ride across the river from New Hall. I got used to seeing the same faces on my morning commute over the rickety cobblestones, the old bicycle I had bought second-hand squealing in protest with every turn of the pedals.

Nothing could have prepared me for the sheer excitement of entering the laboratory for the first time: the long benches, the modern equipment my fingers were itching to touch, and the collections of seeds and dried plants at my disposal in the herbarium (with a permission slip, of course).

As Andrea had warned me, I was one of only three women on the course. Enid and Romy – the other two females – sat determinedly apart from each other during lectures, each seeking out their own territory amongst the men. We would often meet at lunch break at our favourite bench in the Botanical Garden, sharing notes on lectures and raising a communal weary eyebrow at the boys’ antics. The three of us had passionate debates about the future of botany whenever we took a table at The Eagle. The pub was always busy, partly because every scientist at the university seemed to be hoping to catch a glimpse of Watson and Crick, who had discovered the structure of DNA only two years earlier. The night that I spotted the back of

Francis Crick’s head at the bar, I had sat frozen in my seat, so in awe at being close to genius. Enid, who was far more confident than me, had gone straight up to him and talked his ear off until he had beaten a swift but gracious retreat.

‘Of course it was Rosalind Franklin who did most of the work,’ Enid had said fiercely when she had come back to our table. ‘But she’s a woman, so she’ll never get credit for it.’

I hadn’t had the time or the inclination to join any societies, wanting to concentrate all my energies on my studies. Both Celia and Andrea, who had become my firm friends at New Hall, flitted about each weekend from one event to the next, Celia with the chess club and Andrea with the Footlights, the renowned drama troupe. I spent every spare moment in the gardens and in the greenhouses and Dr Walters, one of my professors, had taken me under his wing in the Tropical House, a beautiful glass structure where the air was thick with humidity. There were nights when I didn’t arrive back until curfew, making my way up to my chilly bedroom and sliding between the sheets, exhausted but content.

‘Golly, you’re a dull sort,’ Andrea said to me one morning over breakfast. ‘You hardly venture out if it hasn’t to do with seeds and mud. Well, tonight, there’s a Footlights bash and if I drag you there with my own bare hands, you’re coming with me.’

Knowing Andrea was right, and besides, that she wouldn’t take no for an answer, I let her add one of her bright scarves to the red dress I’d worn for my eighteenth birthday. I knew within a few seconds that it was going to be as grim as I thought it would be. The cacophony of loud voices and music as we entered the rooms of the head of the Footlights warned me that I would be a fish out of water. Nevertheless, I grabbed a drink from the table to help my nerves and entered the fray. Andrea pushed through the crowd to find the host of the proceedings.

‘That’s Freddie there. Isn’t he dreamy?’ She smiled in a most un-Andrea-like way.