The spellbinding new novel from the author of The House at Riverton and The Distant Hours. On a sweltering English summers day, in the final year of the nineteen fifties, the Nicolson family holds a birthday picnic by the stream running through their farm. Amidst the laughter and splashing, sixteen-year-old Laurel hides out in her childhood tree-house dreaming of a boy called Billy and the bright future she cant wait to seize. But before the afternoon is over, Laurel will witness a shocking crime that challenges everything she knows about herself, her family, and especially her mother, Dorothy. Fifty years later and now a much-beloved actress, Laurel finds herself overwhelmed by the past. Haunted by memories, and the mystery of what she saw that day, she returns to the home of her childhood and begins to piece together a secret history. A tale of three strangers from vastly different worlds - Dorothy, Vivian and Jimmy - who meet by chance in wartime London and whose lives become fiercely and fatefully entwined. Shifting from 1920s Australia to Blitz-torn London and beyond, The Secret Keeper is a spellbinding story of mysteries and secrets, theatre and thievery, murder and enduring love.