Jessie Burton is famous for her million-copy bestselling debut novel The Miniaturist, which she followed with The Muse. Now she’s written her third, The Confession. Like The Muse, it is a double narrative, moving between the early 1980s and 2017 (a departure from the historical settings of her previous books).
In 1980, 20-year-old Elise meets Connie — ‘a vixen, upright on her legs’ — on Hampstead Heath. Elise soon forms an intense relationship with this older woman, a successful writer, but when they go to Los Angeles for the filming of Connie’s novel, cracks begin to show.
In 2017 we are with Elise’s daughter, Rose, who’s spent her life inventing stories about her mother to try to fill her absence, unexplained since she left her as a baby. Rose is 34 and adrift. She works in a café, while her boyfriend Joe fails to make a go of his burrito van venture.
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