The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Katie Munnik 2019
Cover photographs © Elizabeth Ansley / Trevillions Images
Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Katie Munnik asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
Excerpt from The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine Words and Music by Harry Carroll and Ballard MacDonald © 1927 Shapiro Bernstein & Co Inc Shapiro Bernstein & Co Limited, New York, NY 10022-5718, USA
Reproduced by permission of Faber Music Ltd All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt from Basho, translated by Lucien Stryk, Penguin 1985
Excerpt from A Doctor Discusses Pregnancy, William G. Birch, Budlong Press 1963
Excerpt from Everybody’s Pudding Book, by Georgiana Hill, Richard Bentley 1862
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008288082
Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008288068
Version: 2019-12-19
Praise for The Heart Beats in Secret:
‘Textured and beautiful. Katie Munnik has a voice full of quiet passion and poetry’
Kate Hamer
‘Munnik unfurls her story in quiet, reflective prose, but there is much to enjoy along the way’
Town and Country
‘[A] powerful, multi-generational novel … full of secrets, stories and discoveries’
Prima
‘Beautifully written and moving’
Woman’s Own
‘The Heart Beats in Secret is a spacious and yet densely woven work … beautifully written’
The Cardiff Review
For Mike, of course.
What are heavy? Sea-sand and sorrow:
What are brief? To-day and to-morrow:
What are frail? Spring blossoms and youth:
What are deep? The ocean and truth.
Christina Georgina Rossetti
Contents