Anna Hope

1911: Inside an asylum at the edge of the Yorkshire moors, where men and women are kept apart by high walls and barred windows, there is a ballroom vast and beautiful.

For one bright evening every week they come together and dance. When John and Ella meet It is a dance that will change two lives forever.

Set over the heatwave summer of 1911, the end of the Edwardian era, The Ballroom is a tale of unlikely love and dangerous obsession, of madness and sanity, and of who gets to decide which is which.

Remembrance Day 1920: a wartime secret connects three women’s lives. As the mystery that binds them begins to unravel, far away, in the fields of France, the Unknown Soldier embarks on his journey home. The mood of the nation is turning towards the future – but can these three women ever let go of the past?

In a spellbinding narrative of sacrifice and survival, chaos and connection, four characters are caught up in the tides of history over three centuries and drawn to the sacred White Rock of San Blas off the coast of Mexico.
In 2020 an Englishwoman travels to give thanks for her child, a singer in 1969 runs from the law, from his rabid fans and an America burning with the fever of the Vietnam War, two Yoeme sisters are torn from their homeland at the start of the twentieth century, and in 1775 a Spanish Lieutenant prepares to set sail from the White Rock to continue the conquest of the Pacific coast.

The White Rock is a breathtaking novel about what happens when the stories we have lived by can no longer keep us safe.