Madam, Will You Talk?

by Mary Stewart

First published 1955

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4.3(13,102)

Charity Selborne sets out on a driving holiday through Provence, hoping that heat, ruins and open roads will offer an uncomplicated escape. Her sympathy for a lonely English boy instead draws her into a family conflict involving his absent father, a disputed murder case and men prepared to use the child as leverage.

As Charity is followed across southern France, the holiday becomes a contest of speed, judgement and trust. Stewart’s first novel establishes the pattern of her romantic suspense: an independent traveller, a vividly observed landscape and a relationship that develops under the pressure of pursuit and incomplete information.