After her grandmother Arlette’s death, Betty is finally ready to begin her life. She had forfeited university, parties, boyfriends, summer jobs – all the usual preoccupations of a woman her age – in order to care for Arlette in their dilapidated, albeit charming home on the English island of Guernsey. Her will included a beneficiary unknown to Betty and her family, a woman named Clara Pickle who presumably could be found at a London address. Now, having landed on a rather shabby street corner in ’90s Soho, Betty is determined to find the mysterious Clara. She’s ready for whatever life has to throw her way. Or so she thinks …

In 1920s bohemian London, Arlette De La Mare is starting her new life in a time of post-war change. Beautiful and charismatic, she is soon drawn into the hedonistic world of the Bright Young People. But two years after her arrival in London, tragedy strikes and she flees back to her childhood home and remains there for the rest of her life.

As Betty navigates the ups and downs of city life and begins working as a nanny for a rock star tabloid magnet, her search for Clara leads her to a man – a stranger to Betty, but someone who meant the world to her grandmother. Will the secrets of Arlette’s past help Betty find her own way to happiness in the present?

A rich detective story and a captivating look at London then and now, “Before I Met You” is an unforgettable novel about two very different women, separated by seventy years, but united by big hearts and even bigger dreams.

In 1983, eleven year old Elizabeth and her family leave Surrey and head off to Guernsey after receiving news that her Stepfather’s Mother, Arlette has had a serious fall and requires someone to live with and take care of her.

Jump to 1995, now known as Betty, she is Arlette’s full time carer. Her friends have left the island for University and to follow their dreams whilst Betty spends her time in Arlette’s big old Guernsey house, dreaming of the bright lights of London, of living in Soho and moving forward with her life.

When Arlette dies, she leaves Betty £1,000 to start her journey along with a mystery to solve. In Arlette’s will is a mysterious beneficiary, who’s last known address is in London. Betty immediately offers to be the one to go and find this mystery lady and sets off to follow her dreams, armed with just two clues – a children’s book featuring a dedication to the beneficiary and the redundant address.

As Betty starts to discover the secrets of her Grandmother’s past, we are provided with Arlette’s similar story of her arrival in London way back in 1920. As Betty finds herself being seduced by a famous music star who lives nearby, we learn of Arlette’s love affair with a famous Jazz musician. Two women of different eras, who look similar and have reflecting lives but are not actually related.

Then she’d sat, her legs crossed together, her arms wrapped round her knees and just stared at Arlette, feeling the essence of her; the glamour, the attitude, the sharpness of her mind and her thwarted attempt at living an unconventional life, feeling it all fill the room and fill her soul, reminding her why she had loved this woman and emphasising everything that she had given to her, rather than what the final years of her life had taken away.

This is a wonderfully written, well researched novel. The collection of characters in both eras is interesting and diverse and the shift from 1920′s to 1990′s London throughout blends perfectly, with the earlier era feeding information to the later as Betty attempts to solve the mystery. The vision of London in both decades is clearly described and the stories of both leading ladies are cleverly intertwined whilst still maintaining the major differences between the times.

As they strode through the darkening streets of London that evening, the pavements glowing gold beneath their feet, funnels of crisp russet leaves twirling and dancing in their wake, she started remembering the way it had felt to have Gideon at her side, his height and his humour, his air of always being on the verge of doing something peculiar and wonderful. She remembered the first time she’d seen him, singing carols on Regent Street last Christmas, the wild look in his eye. He’d later told her it was absinthe. His one and only meeting with the green fairy. He’d been violently sick the next day and never touched the stuff again. But seeing him like that the first time had left him forever in Arlette’s imagination as someone flighty and strange, someone almost magical.‘It has been a long time, hasn’t it?’ she said.