White Dove

Sylvester Lanyon is a doctor whose young wife has died, leaving him adrift in grief with a small daughter to raise. Dorothy lives with her grandfather Matthew in a sprawling country house, and it is there that Sylvester finds himself drawn back to Ella, a childhood friend whose gentle presence begins to stir something like hope back into his hollowed life. But when Sylvester tends to a dying friend, he uncovers a secret so devastating it shatters his entire understanding of the world. He flees to London to continue his researches, leaving Ella and his daughter behind. Ella soon follows, where she meets Roderick, another of Sylvester's friends, and the three find their lives entangled in ways none of them anticipated. White Dove is a romantic drama of hidden truths, second chances, and the way the past reaches forward to claim what it is owed. Locke's novel pulses with early 20th-century emotional intensity: its grief is real, its revelations land like hammer blows, and its ending lingers. For readers who savor the great British romantic melodramas, think Henry James softened by Maurice Dekobra.