Oranges and Lemons

Marcus Maitland has cultivated a life of deliberate solitude. A confirmed bachelor with firm convictions about proper conduct and the proper way to live, he is wholly unprepared for the arrival of his niece Diana, a young woman whose vibrant carefree spirit threatens everything he has carefully ordered. When his sister Sibyl departs, leaving Diana in his charge, Marcus discovers that guardianship demands something he never anticipated: vulnerability. Wemyss writes with sharp observation about the collision between rigidity and youth, between the burdens of family duty and the longing for freedom. The title echoes a nursery rhyme of London bells, a children's game of escape and capture, but the novel asks who truly escapes and who is caught. This is a quiet, incisive study of how caring for another can undo us as much as it fulfills us, and whether tradition is a shelter or a cage.