Clothes-Pegs / Dean Street Press (ePub)

"Do you live permanently in yellow evening frocks and court gowns, or have you anything else?"

Annabel laughed shakily.

"Of course. My own clothes."

"Then go and put them on. Lovely ladies who fall over their trains need cocktails to restore them. And that's just what I'm going to take you to have."

Annabel Brown has taken a job in the sewing room at Bertna's, a high-end dressmaker, to help her family's finances. When one of the "mannequins" employed downstairs quits unexpectedly, Tania Petoff, the shop's owner, decides to try lovely Annabel in her place, to the chagrin of her catty fellow models. Annabel's improved status leads to tension in her close-knit family, then (following a wardrobe malfunction) she catches the eye of wealthy Lord David de Bett-and the ire of the dreadful Honourable Octavia Glaye. How things work themselves out is as delicious a bit of frothy fun as one could well imagine.

Clothes-Pegs is the first of twelve charming, page-turning romances published under the pseudonym "Susan Scarlett" by none other than beloved children's author and novelist Noel Streatfeild. Out of print for decades, they were rediscovered by Greyladies Books in the early 2010s, and Dean Street Press and Furrowed Middlebrow are delighted now to make all twelve available to a wider audience.

"A writer who shows a rich experience in her writing and a charm" Nottingham Journal