Eloise

A Portrait of Hidden Lives

Step through the polished doors of London’s high society into the intimate world of Eloise Carter, a celebrated portrait artist whose celebrated career masks a heart weighed down by loss and longing. In Eloise, Judy Finnigan delivers a haunting exploration of memory and reinvention, as the artist discovers a mysterious commission that will upend everything she thought she knew. From lavish Mayfair ballrooms to the quiet hush of her riverside studio, each brushstroke reveals a fragment of Eloise’s past: the love she buried, the family she forsook, and the yearning that still pulses beneath her calm exterior.

Threads of Resilience

When a chance encounter with a grieving patron brings an unfinished portrait to her doorstep, Eloise is drawn into a web of secrets stretching back decades. As she painstakingly restores the faded canvas, she unearths clues to a vanished sister, a wartime promise, and a betrayal that shattered two lives. Finnigan’s luminous prose threads together scenes of artistic fervor and emotional reckoning, painting vivid tableaux of London’s fog-enshrouded streets, the warmth of candlelit ateliers, and the quiet dignity of resilience. With every layered glaze of paint, Eloise inches closer to the truth—and to the courage needed to forgive herself.

Whispers of the Heart

As the final strokes of color fall into place, the boundary between creator and creation blurs. Eloise must decide whether to expose the portrait’s hidden narrative—risking scandal and heartbreak—or to let the past remain locked within its gilded frame. Amid stolen moments in sunlit gardens and clandestine evenings beneath the stars, she learns that healing often arrives on the wings of vulnerability. By the closing pages, readers will witness an artist reborn, her soul finally laid bare in a masterpiece of redemption.

. Judy Finnigan – acclaimed British television presenter turned novelist, born in 1948, whose elegant narratives blend emotional depth with the subtle artistry of human connection.