Park Lane by Frances Osborne. “If you loved Downton Abbey, you will love Park Lane ... think Downton Abbey in the city. Need I say more? It is a delicious novel about two determined women (one from the ‘upstairs’ family and another from the ‘downstairs’ staff) whose lives collide in the halls of a pedigreed London town home. When eighteen-year-old Grace Carlisle arrives in London in 1914, she’s unable to fulfill her family's ambitions and find a position as an office secretary. Lying to her parents and her brother, Michael, she takes a job as a housemaid at Number 35, Park Lane, where she is quickly caught up in lives of its inhabitants--in particular, those of its privileged son, Edward, and daughter, Beatrice, who has just returned from America after being unceremoniously jilted by her fiancé. Desperate to find a new purpose, Beatrice joins the radical suffragist movement and strikes up an intriguing romance with an impassioned young lawyer. But unbeknownst to both of the young women, the choices they make will connect their chances at future happiness in dramatic and inevitable ways.” This author also wrote The Bolter, which appeared on our list a couple of years ago. [Ed: She had me at “Downton.” She didn’t even have to say “Abbey.”]
