Set in the 1950s, in an England still recovering from the Second World War, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets is the enchanting story of Penelope Wallace and her eccentric family at the start of the rock'n'roll era. Penelope longs to be grown-up and to fall in love; but various rather inconvenient things keep getting in her way. Like her mother, a stunning but petulant beauty widowed at a tragically early age, her younger brother Inigo, currently incapable of concentrating on anything that isn't Elvis Presley, a vast but crumbing ancestral home, a severe shortage of cash, and her best friend Charlotte's sardonic cousin Harry...Eva Rice's novel is an utterly engrossing read, in the tradition of Nancy Mitford and I Capture the Castle.