At the age of twenty-one, shy Rupert Bogarde fell in love with a nurse a great deal more worldly than he. Jacquie loved France and the couple moved there, married and bought a ruined chapel near Perpignan to turn into a business. Juggling restoration and building work with odd jobs, they eventually opened a holiday centre for young diabetics. With the birth of their two sons their dream should have been complete, but Jacquie had become obsessed with the business - working and partying for days and nights without sleep - while Rupert struggled to keep his family and marriage together.

Jacquie's mania became alarming, until one evening she disappeared. Rupert, by now heavily in debt, was left alone with the children and a business in ruins. Her car was later found crashed and abandoned by the roadside and Rupert soon became the French police's number one suspect. He looked for her for years, learning to live with people's assumptions that he was responsible for Jacquie's disappearance. Then in 2000, seven years after Jacquie's disappearance, he finally discovered the truth.

'Unsparing in its raw honesty' You Magazine

'A story that lingers in the reader's consciousness, haunting through its wider possibilities' Independent on Sunday