When her widower father drowns at sea, ten-year-old Gemma Hardy, an only child, is taken from her native Iceland to Scotland, to live with her uncle’s family. But the death of her doting guardian soon after leaves Gemma under the resentful eye of her aunt. When she receives a scholarship to a private school, Gemma believes she’s found the perfect solution, and she eagerly sets out again to a new home. But at Claypoole, she finds herself treated as an unpaid servant.

To Gemma’s delight, the school finally goes bankrupt in 1959 and she takes a job as an au pair on the Orkney Islands. Remote Blackbird Hall belongs to Mr. Sinclair, a rich, single London businessman; his eight-year-old niece is Gemma’s charge. An unlikely pair, Gemma and Sinclair are nonetheless drawn to each another, but their courtship is cut short by Gemma’s discovery of a secret that has shadowed her employer’s life. Set in Iceland and Scotland in the 1950s and ’60s, The Flight of Gemma Hardy is a captivating homage to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—a sweeping saga that resurrects the timeless themes of the original but is destined to become a classic all its own.

MARGOT LIVESEY is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Flight Of Gemma Hardy, The House on Fortune Street, Banishing Verona, Eva Moves the Furniture, The Missing World, Criminals, and Homework. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vogue, and the Atlantic, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. The House on Fortune Street won the 2009 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Born in Scotland, Livesey currently lives in the Boston area and is a professor of fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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