MARIKA COBBOLD

An account of a young woman''s battle to save her grandmother from a retirement home, her battle against her boyfriend''s defection, and with her mother''s obsession with germs.

By the time Grace is eighteen, she has been orphaned, moved countries and lost touch with her only brother. She can''t help thinking that she''s managed to lose, rather carelessly, anything she''s ever loved. So she decides to revisit her past in America, and she''s brought her camera to catch these memories. What she isn''t expecting that long, hot summer in New Hampshire is to meet the love of her life... Some years later, now divorced and flourishing as a controversial photographer, Grace finds that she is being haunted by the past. And when she slips on a fallen autumn leaf, her past crashes into her present...

"A mystery and an elegy for the death of old-fashioned journalism, its a book that will warm your heart"The Observer"On Hampstead Heath is a deliciously romantic comedy of misunderstandings and misbehaviour - I loved it" Clare Chambers, author of SMALL PLEASURESThorn Marsh was raised in a house of whispers, of meaningful glances and half- finished sentences. Now shes a journalist with a passion for truth, more devoted to her work at the London Journal than she ever was to her ex-husband. When the newspaper is bought by media giant The Goring Group, who value sales figures over fact-checking, Thorn openly questions their methods, and promptly finds herself moved from the news desk to the midweek supplement, reporting heart-warming stories for their new segment, The Bright Side, a job to which she is spectacularly unsuited. On a final warning and with no heart-warming news in sight, a desperate Thorn fabricates a good-news story of her own. The story, centred on an angelic apparition on Hampstead Heath, goes viral. Caught between her principles and her ambitions, Thorn goes in search of the truth behind her creation, only to find the answers locked away in the unconscious mind of a stranger.Marika Cobbold returns with her eighth novel, On Hampstead Heath. Sharp, poignant, and infused with dark humour, On Hampstead Heath is an homage to storytelling and to truth; to the tales we tell ourselves, and the stories that save us."Splendid . . . Funny, poignant, perceptive and plenty of sharp elbows along the way" Val McDermid