The Island Escape

Can one woman’s marriage survive her best friend’s divorce? Veronica Henry meets Erica James in this summer’s must-have read.

Octavia Shelton thought she’d have a different life. One where she travelled the world with an exotic husband and free-spirited children in tow.

Instead she’s married to safe, reliable Jonathan, and her life now consists of packed lunches, school runs and mountains of dirty washing. She’s not unhappy. It’s just that she can barely recognise herself.

So as Octavia watches her best friend’s marriage break up, it gets her thinking. What if life could be different? What if she could escape and rediscover the person she used to be? Escape back to the island she visited years ago? And what if the man she used to love was there waiting for her?

Kerry was brought up in Peterborough. She now lives in Surrey with a very tolerant husband and two children. She studied at Bath University and speaks fluent Italian, Spanish and French. She also trained as a journalist at City University, then went on to write travel guidebooks for Thomas Cook.After landing her dream job working on women’s magazines, she discovered that she hated writing about real people in case their families got upset.The Writers’ Program at the University of California helped her move from fact into fiction – the perfect forum for exploring human emotions without worrying about some poor mother weeping over her son’s account of his childhood.