A Spring of Love

What price would you pay for love? Esther Williams is thirty and single. She has been nowhere, done nothing, loved no one except her recently deceased grandfather. Her life is one of routine and order, following the same pattern week after week. That is, until she meets Raymond Banks. Raymond is unassuming but insistent, and each conversation with him brings Esther further out of her shell. He alters her awareness of the world, and their budding love is soon cemented with a proposal. For the first time ever, she feels truly alive. But marriage to Raymond brings a different kind of order, one of increasing control and possession. When Esther discovers something that threatens their happiness, she is forced to decide whether true love really should conquer all. An unsettling portrait of love in all its guises, A Spring of Love asks the most sinister question of all - can we ever truly know anyone.

Celia Dale was born in 1912 to parents who were both on the stage. She was once a secretary to Rumer Godden, and also worked as a publisher's advisor and a book reviewer. Her first novel, The Least of These, was published in 1943, and she went on to write twelve others, among them A Helping Hand and Sheep's Clothing. She won the 1986 Crime Writers Association Veuve Clicquot Short Story Award for 'Lines of Communication', which appears in her only short story collection, A Personal Call and Other Stories. She died in 2011.