Lee Langley

A richly imaginative novel of love, loss, time and the rise and fall of a great maritime empire, that sends two thwarted lovers spiralling through the chaos of history.

The story begins in 1429 on Madeira, when a peasant girl meets a boy- a Jewish outsider- from a Portuguese sailing ship. Esperança and Emmanuel know they must part when the ship sails. From that first meeting and parting, others follow...

Emmanuel is in turn sailor, mapmaker, bookseller, jazz musician; Esperança an illiterate peasant, a rich girl in Faro and a clever, bookish recluse who confronts a murderer in nineteenth-century Lisbon. In twentieth-century London, Esperança is faced with a double incarnation, one of the true Emmanuel and the other a shadow. Over the centuries the couple face peril and tenderness. Each life is short. What survives is love.

Teasing out the extraordinary within the everyday, FALSE PRETENCES is a contemporary novel in mosiac. Through the separate yet interlinked stories, it traces the lives of two women as they deal with the complexities of love, private terrors, violence and - most precarious of all - hope. There is mystery, wry humour, sometimes tragedy beneath the jaunty surfaces glimpsed through the years, until, by the end, we have encompassed their lives.