The news is out! Bestselling author Dinah Jefferies will be moving from Viking to HarperFiction with a trilogy series focused on three sisters who have been living in their family’s French summer home until war breaks out and changes their lives forever. Publishing director Lynne Drew snapped up world English rights to the three novels from Caroline Hardman. We are very excited to see the first novel in the trilogy published in 2021.

Dinah said: “I’m delighted with this move to HarperFiction and excited to be writing a trilogy. Lynne Drew is an exceptional editor and I can’t wait to begin the next stage of what has been a life changing career.”

Lynne Drew said: “I love Dinah’s captivating storytelling: she writes historical fiction that weaves the dark with the light, with an extraordinary sense of place and showing the triumph of the human spirit under duress. I am so excited about her move to HarperFiction with this trilogy of sweeping, epic novels.”

Telling the story of three half-English sisters who have been living at their family’s summer home, deep in the Perigord Noir, since before the outbreak of war, the novel follows the three women as their beautiful, rural part of occupied France is caught between the sabotage of the Maquis and the reprisals of the occupying German army, wounded below the waterline but determined to fight to the end.

Hélène, the eldest sister, is pulled from her work as a nurse further into the fight against the Nazis than she ever expected. The next two novels will each focus on one of the sisters, the second moving between England and Malta.

Dinah Jefferies was born in Malaysia and moved to England at the age of nine. Her idyllic childhood always held a special place in her imagination, and when she began writing novels in her 60s, she was able to return there – first in her fiction and then on annual research trips for each new novel. She is the author of the best-selling novels, The Separation, The Tea Planter’s Wife – a Number One Sunday Times bestseller, The Silk Merchant’s Daughter, Before the Rains, The Sapphire Widow, The Missing Sister and her most recent title The Tuscan Contessa. She is published in nearly 30 countries and has shifted 543,403 copies for £2.8m through Nielsen Bookscan, with her bestseller The Tea Planter’s Wife, at 238,333 copies sold in paperback. She lives in Gloucestershire.

You can read the full Bookseller article here.