They had found Annabel next to her mother’s body in the ruins of a house levelled by German bombs. The lady of the house had been killed as well, and nobody recognised either the child or her mother... moreThey had found Annabel next to her mother’s body in the ruins of a house levelled by German bombs. The lady of the house had been killed as well, and nobody recognised either the child or her mother. All Annabel knew was her name, written on the back of a snapshot in the little tartan purse they found at her side, and a poem that she could just barely remember her mother singing — a poem about the day when her family would go home to her father’s ‘land beyond the sea’, in a place of mountains and lakes . . . ‘a place that, darling, you call Paradise. ’. Then she saw the tourist brochure, urging her to visit a place called Paradise, in far-off New Zealand, at the head of a lake ringed in by the Southern Alps. And somehow she felt certain that this had been her father’s home, and that there might still be Lees in Paradise, and that perhaps fate had given her, against all odds, a chance of finding her roots and her family. When she met Gideon Darroch at New Zealand House and learned that he could offer her a job at a guest-house just a few miles away from Paradise, she leaped at it. If only Gideon hadn’t blown so hot and so cold — and if only she could have revealed herself to her grandparents once she realised their late son had been her father! less
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