An ARC (Advance Reading Copy) is a book that publishers send to their employees, reviewers, bloggers, and booksellers to read, review, and send feedback. It helps to boost sales, promote awareness, and even help catch some last-minute errors before publication.

I was able to get my hands on a DRC (Digital Reading Copy) of Kate Morton’s upcoming novel The Secret Keeper through Edelweiss. One of my managers at work knew I loved Victorian, Gothic, and neo-Victorian/Gothic literature, and had actually requested an ARC of The Secret Keeper for me! She was kind enough to let me have it!

1959 England. Laurel Nicolson is sixteen years old, dreaming alone in her childhood tree house during a family celebration at their home, Green Acres Farm. She spies a stranger coming up the long road to the farm and then observes her mother, Dorothy, speaking to him. And then she witnesses a crime.

Fifty years later, Laurel is a successful and well-regarded actress, living in London. She returns to Green Acres for Dorothy’s ninetieth birthday and finds herself overwhelmed by memories and questions she has not thought about for decades. She decides to find out the truth about the events of that summer day and lay to rest her own feelings of guilt. One photograph, of her mother and a woman Laurel has never met, called Vivian, is her first clue.

The Secret Keeper explores longings and dreams, the lengths some people go to fulfill them, and the strange consequences they sometimes have. It is a story of lovers, friends, dreamers and schemers, play-acting and deception told against a backdrop of events that changed the world.

Expected publication: October 9th. Atria. Hardcover. 480 pages.