It is a compelling chronicle of the changes that transformed every strand and strata of British life, faith and thought. A new collection of short stories by the award-winning author of Waiting . Charles Corday, a portrait painter, has been found guilty of murder, the murder of a Countess whom he was in the process of painting. He had been sentenced to hang. But political pressures make it expedient for the Home Office to confirm his guilt.
Sandman has a mere seven days to snatch an innocent man from the hungriest gallows of Europe.
The hangman is waiting. It is a race against the noose. As a young girl in late nineteenth century Chile, Aurora del Valle suffered a brutal trauma that shaped her character and erased from her mind all recollection of the first five years of her life. Raised by her ambitious grandmother, she grows up in a privileged environment, free of the limitations that circumscribe the lives of women at that time, but tormented by terrible nightmares. When she finds herself alone at the end of an unhappy love affair, she decides to explore the mystery of her past, to discover what it was that had such a devastating effect on her young life.