Linden Woods

Set during the World War II years in rural South Staffordshire and in Eire, LINDEN

WOODS is a compulsive tale of love, desire and heartbreak.

SYNOPSIS In 1937 with the country preparing for war, eighteen-year-old Linden Woods finds employment as a junior secretary at a Black Country steelworks, where she befriends the charismatic and liberated Penny, daughter of wealthy steel magnate Charles Burgayne. While Charles comes to admire Linden’s competence, his sons Edward and Hugh admire her vivacious looks and sharp intellect, and despite the class differences, both vie for her attention but with vastly different methods. Linden grows to love one and despise the other with devastating consequences for everybody, which are severely aggravated because of war. GREAT MEDIA REVIEW If 18-year-old Linden Woods were a typical English working-class girl, her life would be predetermined. She would leave school, get a menial job, marry, and quit work to have children. But two things conspire against this scenario: Linden isn’t typical, and World War II is on the horizon. Ambitious, smart, and beautiful, Linden is hired as a shorthand typist at Blower’s Green Steelworks but meets and soon falls in love with handsome Edward Burgayne, the son of the steelworks owner. She is nervous that the Burgayne family will view her as an interloper, but only Edward’s elder brother Hugh poses a problem. He claims Linden is a gold digger, but secretly he desires her for himself. When Edward is called up to fight in the war, Hugh sees his chance to claim Linden and plots a terrible scheme to get her — a scheme that nearly destroys the entire Burgayne family. Nancy Carson’s latest romance has all the right ingredients—a beautiful heroine, a handsome hero, an evil villain, passion, romance, wartime tragedy—to guarantee it an audience of historical-romance devotees. HISTORICAL NOTE The novel "Linden Woods" highlights a prison camp known as K-Lines which existed in the Curragh in Eire for the internment of airmen, Allies and German. In this camp the internees were privileged to have pass-outs that enabled them to play golf on the nearby course, go to horse races, local dances and even to date the local girls. Because it was a privilege every man returned to the camp to honour the pass-out system. However, once back inside it was their duty to try and escape!