Abdication

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...