Monarch's Row: A Novel

Author/Contributor(s):	Kallos, Stephanie
Publisher:	Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Date:	3/30/2027
Binding:	Hardcover
Condition:	NEW

A novel in the tradition of All the Light We Cannot See that follows a girl named Enid Asquith who is kept shut away in her family’s London home until an act of violence catapults her out into the world—a wartime love triangle, a literary puzzle, and a moving exploration of the power of authorship.

Enid is born in Bombay in 1901 with a severe cleft palate. Living in a North London suburb, her older siblings Theodora and Gordon mostly away at school, she spends her days exploring the nooks and crannies of a house she is never allowed to leave. When circumstances change in the wake of a terrible accident, the family cook, Nassih, whisks her away for reparative surgery, beginning a formative friendship between the two of them. But then a false accusation sends Nassih into police custody just before events at Enid's coming-out party take a terrible turn, leaving her scarred in a way that will inform the rest of her life.

Amulya arrives at a Scottish school for underprivileged children in the fall of 1914 to seek shelter and offer up her talents as a teacher, though she is only fourteen herself. She spends her days reading aloud to the children and deep in conversation with Christopher, the school’s most beloved and, at sixteen, oldest ward. When Christopher lies about his age to join the fighting in Europe, Amulya volunteers at a local hospital specializing in treating soldiers who’ve sustained facial injuries. A nascent romance grows through letters, but Christopher is keeping a secret—he’s illiterate—and so he must rely on his friend and fellow soldier, Cyril, to maintain the correspondence. When both men land in Amulya’s hospital in the wake of the Battle of Arras, the aftereffects of Christopher’s deception and the truth of Cyril’s feelings for Amulya bring about a tragic series of events that won’t leave any of them unscathed.

E.M. is a well-known children’s author, and in 1925 she has written her first book for adults, a new direction she's nervous about taking. As she makes her way by train from Scotland to London where she is to meet with her publishers, she shares the manuscript with a fellow traveler, the mother of a son who still suffers from the invisible injuries he sustained in the War. Her feedback will change not only the shape of E.M.’s novel—about a triangulated epistolary romance—but the course of its author’s life.