A novel by Gloria Sorel
Eleven days missing.
Thirteen years of silence.
Elizabeth came home. She rebuilt her life. She simply never told anyone where she had been.
Meet Elizabeth
Vale & Daughter · Book One
She came back. She never explained why.
For thirteen years, Elizabeth Vale has held together a life built on duty, competence and one carefully protected absence.
Then a letter, an old key and a workshop by the sea begin to loosen everything she believed had been safely put away.
ELIZABETH is a psychologically layered novel about the cost of being dependable, the stories women tell in order to survive, and the moment silence stops being a refuge.
The first novel in the Vale & Daughter series. More on the ground it was written from in the Journal.
The world of the novel
Welcome to Selwyn Bay.
A coastal town of salt air, old stone and lives observed at close range. Here, Vale & Daughter restores books by hand — while Elizabeth discovers that some histories refuse to remain bound.
Selwyn Bay is not an escape from the past. It is the place where the past finally asks to be answered.
- The workshop Paper, thread and patient repair
- The letters Words that arrived years too late
- The key A small object with a long memory
The author
Gloria Sorel
Gloria Sorel writes quiet British women’s fiction: literary family drama about women who have spent years being strong for everyone else — and the difficult work of starting over, in the middle of a life.
Her fiction is shaped by the emotional detail of ordinary lives: what remains unsaid at family tables, what is hidden inside competence, and what can begin when a woman stops mistaking endurance for peace.
ELIZABETH is the first novel in the Vale & Daughter series.
Available now
Elizabeth
A story for every woman who has ever wondered whether the life she holds together still belongs to her.
Out now on Kindle and in paperback.
Privacy
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This site is run by Gloria Sorel, who can be reached at contact@gloriasorel.com. Any question about this notice, or about anything held about you, can go to that address.
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The contact address forwards to a private mailbox, which is not published here. If you write, your message and the address you wrote from arrive in that mailbox and stay there for as long as it takes to answer you and to keep a sensible record of the correspondence. They are used for that and for nothing else. There is no mailing list, so you cannot be added to one.
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The buy links lead to amazon.co.uk, where Amazon’s own privacy policy applies.
About the images
The cover of ELIZABETH, the portrait of Elizabeth Vale and the view of Selwyn Bay were made with an AI image tool. Selwyn Bay is an invented town and Elizabeth Vale an invented woman: neither picture is a photograph of anywhere or anyone.
The portrait of the author is a photograph of Gloria Sorel, edited with the same tool.