Love Song by Nikki Gemmell

I’m twenty-one, it’s the law, I’m twenty-one, I’m shouting it to my parents and then it stops and a tense quiet hovers in the waiting house.

Am I to die in this place, I’ve written in my journal on that blunted birthday, before my life has ever begin?

This is the story of Lillie Bird, a woman from a locked religious community who one day finds herself in the freedom of a strange new world, England, accused of murdering a man.

It was there, in that land of cold, dark skies and scuffed and tumbling streets that she had first found the pleasure and the sadness, and the love she had, for years, so desperately sought.

Love Song is at once a celebration of the human spirit and a powerful story of exile, identity and love. Mesmerising and heartbreaking