Author Beatriz Williams

In THE SECRET LIFE OF VIOLET GRANT, Williams deftly merges history, political intrigue, and dual romances that unfold decades apart. She cleverly alternates between the complex politics of Europe on the brink of the FIRST WORLD WAR and a modern woman’s daring choices in mid-sixties Manhattan, and it all begins with a fifty-year-old errant valise carrying a lifetime of secrets. Living in a ramshackle Greenwich Village walk-up, recent Bryn Mawr graduate Vivian Schuyler has defied her posh Park Avenue family to pursue a Mad Men-world career at Metropolitan magazine. But when a battered old suitcase arrives in the mail, it hands her a provocative mystery as it serendipitously introduces a man who seems to good to be true, a man who might just be the love of her life. With a reporter’s determination to trace the musty valise’s origins, Vivian learns that it once belonged to a great aunt she’s never heard of—Violet Schuyler Grant. Vivian has never heard the name because it has been virtually erased from her family history amid rumors of a crime of passion committed while Violet lived and worked abroad. Vivian hopes to solve the mystery and boost her career with a splashy Metropolitan article on the subject, but she gets more than she bargained for when she is inexorably drawn into her family’s past. Instead Vivian is stunned by the startling world of Violet Grant, specifically Violet’s brilliant career as a physicist, her unhappy marriage to a cruel and philandering mentor, her unwitting affair with a British soldier-turned-spy, and a perilous escape to Switzerland as Germany closed its borders. Branded a murderess and an adulteress, Violet dropped out of sight and was presumed dead in the Great War that ensued, but now the valise contents propel her great-niece on a mission with startling revelations. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: The daughter of a British national, author Beatriz Williams has always been fascinated by stories of England’s Great War and the intrepid soldiers who marched out of its trenches and into oblivion. In fact her affinity for the period’s heroic values sparked a manuscript idea that won awards even before it was published. Williams’s evocative 2012 debut Overseas paid homage to those values in an engrossing and unconventional love story. The following year she published another international bestseller, A Hundred Summers, an unforgettable novel of desire and betrayal set against the real-life 1938 hurricane that devastated the lives and landscape of southern New England. A Stanford University honors graduate with an MBA in finance from Columbia, Beatriz Williams lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with her husband and children. She is the author of the international bestsellers Overseas and A Hundred Summers