Abdication - Juliet Nicolson

England, 1936. After the recent death of George V, the nation has a
new king, Edward VIII. But for all the confident pomp and ceremony of the accession, it is a turbulent time. Terrible poverty and unemployment
affect many, but trouble few among the ruling elite; for others, Oswald
Mosley's New Party, which offers a version of the fascism on the rise
in Germany, seems to offer the vision of the future. Nineteen-year-old May Thomas has just disembarked at Liverpool Docks
after making the long journey by steamer from Barbados to escape the
constraints of her sugar-plantation childhood. Her first job as a secretary and chauffeuse to Sir
Philip Blunt, Chief Whip in Baldwin's Conservative government, will open her eyes to the upper echelons of British society... The unlikely friendship she forms with Evangeline Nettlefold, American
god-daughter of the Chief Whip's wife and an old school friend of Wallis
Simpson, will see her through family upheavals including the shocking,
sudden loss of her mother; but more significant for May, the Blunts' son
Rupert has an Oxford University friend, Julian, a young man of
conscience for whom, despite all barriers of class, she cannot help but fall. Secrets, hidden truths, undeclared loves,
unspoken sympathies and covert complicities are everywhere - biggest and most dangerous
of them all, the truth about the new King's relationship with a married
woman, and the silent horror that few in Britain dare voice: the
increasing inevitability of another world war...