The beautiful, red-haired Sarah Durrant is an uneducated servant who takes the place of her mistress when she suddenly dies at Lynmouth, as they are travelling to Ilfracombe across the remote wilderness of 18th century Exmoor. Her own origins are a mystery. She only knows she is illegitimate and possesses a gold locket which contains a miniature of a woman who resembles her. North Devon at first proves a sanctuary from the violence of her past but then the French aristocrat Jean Luc de Delacroix arrives from the New World en route to Alsace; the local activities of smuggling and wrecking surface; and her life becomes a tangle of love, deception and fear.
Winner of the David St John Thomas Fiction Award.