Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom King Edward VIII gave up a throne, is a woman of myth and legend. She was also a woman of many secrets - secrets even the enslaved Edward and those who reviled her, never suspected.

Rebecca Dean takes us into the world that formed her. The Baltimore childhood where she had to subsist on charity, desperately wanting to be part of an elite social circle denied to her and yet hers by right. Her girlhood where, uncaring of the conventions of the time, she discovered the power she was always to have over men. Her first marriage to a violently abusive husband, her precarious and reckless years in Peking and Shanghai and the glamorous years in 1930's London when, as Mrs Ernest Simpson, her finely-honed social climbing skills culminate in an introduction that will alter the course of British royal history - her introduction to Edward, Prince of Wales.

Within the freedom that a novel gives, Rebecca Dean brings together aspects of Wallis Simpson's life previously only hinted at. This is Wallis as she has never been seen before - a Wallis with whom the reader can at last be in sympathy with.