When Lucinda Riley died in 2021, it seemed that there would be no new books from her, but since then her son Harry Whittaker has completed her final, unfinished Seven Sisters novel, Atlas, and now has reworked one of her earliest novels which was originally published as Hidden Beauty in 1993 under the name of Lucinda Edmonds. Retitled The Hidden Girl, it’s not clear exactly how much input Harry has had, but he states in the foreword that he has ‘refreshed and updated the text’.

After a brief prologue, we meet our heroine Leah Thompson as a shy teenage girl living with her parents in 1970s Yorkshire. Leah has no big plans for the future – her time is filled with schoolwork and assisting her mother with her job as housekeeper at the big farmhouse owned by Rose Delancey – and she doesn’t consider herself to be anything special. She does have natural beauty, but is overshadowed by more confident girls, like Mrs Delancey’s adopted daughter, Miranda. Yet it’s Leah, not Miranda, who is spotted by a London modelling agency and within a few years has become one of the world’s top models.

In a second timeline, we join the young Rose – or Rosa as she was previously known – and her brother David, who are children in Poland during the Second World War. Rose and David are from a Jewish family and like many Polish Jews they experience some terrible things and are very lucky to survive the war. Some of the tension is lost because we already know that Rose and David are still alive in the late 1970s – we meet Rose in the very first chapter, a semi-retired artist living in Yorkshire with Miranda and her older son, Miles, and we learn that David is a wealthy businessman and a widower with a teenage son, Brett. However, it’s still harrowing to read about the things they had to go through before reaching a more settled status in life.

Although the wartime narrative does have relevance to the lives of the younger generation – in ways that they themselves don’t understand until much later – most of the novel is devoted to the ‘present day’ storyline (the 70s and 80s). At first I thought it was going to be a bit of a shallow story about celebrities leading glamorous lifestyles, but I soon discovered there was more depth to it than that. Riley explores the dark side of stardom and the fashion industry, including the temptations of drugs and alcohol, the pressure to succeed, the internal rivalries and competitiveness, and the men who just want to take advantage of beautiful young women. Some of the things that happen to Leah’s friend, Jenny, in particular, are horrible and I think anyone who picks up this book expecting a light read may be surprised by the topics it covers.

This is actually the third Lucinda Edmonds book to be reissued under a new title, after The Italian Girl and The Love Letter, but those two were rewritten by Lucinda herself and published during her lifetime. I wonder whether any of her other Edmonds novels will be reworked by Harry now as well – or whether he’ll decide to write a book of his own.

Thanks to Pan Macmillan for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.