Dear Rosie Hughes: This is the most uplifting and emotional novel you will read in 2019!

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HarperImpulse

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Copyright © Melanie Hudson 2019

Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com

Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Melanie Hudson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008319625

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008319618

Version: 2018-09-26

To Andrew, Edward and Meg

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

PART ONE

PART TWO

Epilogue

Author’s Notes

About the Author

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

Prologue

From: aggieb@yahoo.com

To: rosie-of-arabia@yahoo.com

Subject: My First Chapter!

Date: 28 June 2003

Hi, Rosie

I know I’m going to see you next week, but I had to write straight away and tell you that I’ve completed the first few chapters of my new novel – and the words flew onto the page! It will probably be cut to pieces in the edit, but all I can say is, ‘Thank Christ for that!’

And so, thank you, my wonderful friend, for allowing me to tell your story. I promise to take the very best of care of it. I’m wetting myself with excitement about writing the final chapter, which is going to be so blooming heart-warming, there will not be a dry eye in the house. Just imagine the scene: two old friends meet up for the first time on an achingly beautiful Scottish beach, one having just come back from a war zone in the desert, the other having finally found a purpose to her life, after years of being lost in a desert of her own. We lost many years of friendship (and all because of a man and a misunderstanding) but once you get home, we can crack on with a new bucket list and pledge (in blood, if necessary) to never lose touch again. Anyway, enough mush. Here’s the blurb for the book. Let me know what you think:

Life in Rosie Hughes

By

Agatha Braithwaite

Blurb

It all began – as, perhaps, all such romantic stories should – with a miserable heroine, a crazy idea and an epic train journey. Such was the case for Stella Valentine, a beautiful but lonely romance writer who, on a dank December afternoon, decided on a whim to escape to the wilds of the Scottish Highlands, having lobbed her laptop and latest manuscript into the nearest river first. As anyone who has embarked on a ‘bugger-it’, life-changing journey will confess, at the outset it is impossible to know if the new path will lead to the much-longed-for ‘happy ever after’ or if it will simply prove to be yet another crappy, pot-holed road leading to even deeper depths of despair.

But as Stella glanced whimsically out of the window of the old steam train as it powered its way down the glen, any lastminute reservations were forced to the back of her mind. She didn’t notice the driving wind and rain, but felt her heart lifted – yes, physically lifted - by the deep dark lochs, towering mountains and faded heather moorlands; a landscape surely designed for the swaddling of the lost and lonely. And as she stepped onto the platform at Mallaig station, she had the definite notion – or the ‘ken’ as her new Scottish friends would say – that the next six months would prove to be the most pivotal of her life.

What Stella did not know, however, was that at the very same moment she stepped off the train and walked across the platform, dragging her case behind her and smiling into the rain, her childhood friend, Rosie Hughes, was not only thinking of her but had, quite coincidentally and on the very same day, embarked on an epic journey of her own, but to a significantly more dangerous corner of the globe.

This is not just Stella’s story, then, but a story of rekindled friendship, and of two women who find that every single day matters, and that nothing in life is so bad or so utterly unfathomable, when shared between friends.

With all the love in the world,

Aggie (AKA Stella Valentine – I told you I’d find a use for the name)

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