My Little Lady

Young English medical student Horace Graham detours through the quiet Belgian spa town of Chaudfontaine, intending to stay a single night before continuing to Brussels. Instead, he finds himself captivated by Madeleine, a singular little girl rehearsing dance steps with her doll in the hotel garden. She is sharp-tongued, peculiar, and utterly unselfconscious, and she happens to be the daughter of M. Linders, a well-known gambler whose reputation hangs over their household like weather. What begins as an idle encounter becomes something stranger: Horace, an outsider, watches as the child's world unfolds between her father's absences and her own vivid imagination. There is tenderness here, but also a quiet unease. The adult world's compromises and the child's world of play exist side by side, and Frances Poynter writes their intersection with delicate precision. This is a novel about what it means to observe innocence from the threshold of adulthood, and what we owe to children shaped by choices not their own.