The Pearl Sister

**Author:** Lucinda Riley

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The search for identity when the person who defined you is gone, the weight of family secrets across generations, and the discovery that home is not always a place but sometimes a person, a landscape, or a name you finally learn to say.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who love sweeping family sagas, stories that move between past and present, and characters who must lose everything to find out who they truly are.

CeCe D'Aplièse has spent her entire life feeling like the wrong person. Dyslexic in a family of readers, practical in a family of dreamers, and dependent on her sister Star in ways she has never fully admitted, she has always been the one who needed translating. When their adoptive father, the mysterious billionaire known only as Pa Salt, dies and leaves each of his six daughters a clue to her origins, CeCe receives a photograph of two men standing beside a truck in the Australian outback and the name of a woman called Kitty Mercer in a town called Broome. The premise is deceptively simple: a grieving daughter follows a trail across the world to discover where she came from. But The Pearl Sister is not really about the destination. It is about what happens when the person who always held your hand lets go. Star, CeCe's closest sister and lifelong anchor, has fallen in love and moved into a new life. For the first time, CeCe must navigate airports, conversations, and her own racing thoughts without the sister who always smoothed the way. She is terrified of spiders, of strangers, of being exposed as stupid, and yet she boards a plane to Bangkok with nothing but a photograph and a name. The novel moves between two timelines. In the present, CeCe stumbles through Thailand and Australia, making mistakes, forming unexpected bonds, and slowly discovering that she is an artist of genuine talent. In the past, beginning in 1906, the story follows Kitty McBride, a Scottish minister's daughter whose own journey to Australia begins with a devastating discovery about her father. Kitty's story, told through a biography that CeCe's enigmatic new friend Ace reads aloud to her, becomes the key to unlocking CeCe's own history. The two women, separated by a century, are connected by blood, by place, and by the particular loneliness of women who must build themselves from scratch. The tone is lush and atmospheric. Lucinda Riley writes with a romantic sensibility that never tips into sentimentality. The pearl-diving town of Broome, with its dust, its heat, its racial hierarchies, and its dangerous beauty, feels as vivid as any character. The red…