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The Lost Son Trilogy: three stories of family, love, hope and redemption

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'An unmissable read packed with secrets and revelations' OK!

THE HOUSE AT CHORLTON

In postwar Gloucestershire, Laura Oliver falls in love with Giovanni, an Italian ex-prisoner-of-war, now a humble cook. The couple flee her father's wrath to London. Facing destitution, only their love for one another and their dream of opening a restaurant business keeps them going. From Cotswolds farmland to London fish markets, this is a tale of prejudice, ambition and one couple's struggle to overcome all obstacles and carve out a life of their own.

THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER

It is 1968. Angelica Angelotti has grown up in her parents' Italian restaurant. Now she is striking out on her own in Paris. There she falls in love with her charismatic but unpredictable cousin Mario. Navigating a blossoming career, from the Savoy hotel to the world of television, alongside an increasingly toxic relationship proves impossible. The offer to run the pub on her family's estate as a restaurant seems like the perfect escape. Chorlton has called her home...

THE LOST SON

The Angelotti family reels when Tom, Laura and Giovanni's lost son, given up for adoption in the war, traces his birth family and returns to the fold, with devastating consequences. But Laura has been keeping an explosive secret about Tom's parentage that means his reappearance in her life is bittersweet. She may have found her son, but will it be at the cost of everything it has taken her fifty years to build?

Prue Leith

Now 86 years old, Dame Prue Leith is first and foremost a businesswoman, who made her name with Michelin starred restaurant, and Prue Leith's school of Food and Wine which she sold in in 1995. She has written more than a dozen cookery books, seven novels, and Relish, her original memoire in 2013, and has worked as a columnist for Daily Mail, The Guardian and the Daily Mirror.

Her first television appearance was in the 1970s as a presenter, and she returned to television to be a judge on The Great British Menu for 11 years until 2016 and a judge for My Kitchen Rules, which she left to replace Mary Berry in The Great British Bake Off.

She has also been active in general education, and many diverse organisations including Ashridge Management College, Kings College, and as Chancellor of Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. While at the RSA, she led the successful campaign to use the empty plinth, now known as the Fourth Plinth, in Trafalgar Square to house changing sculptures or installations by the best contemporary artists.

She has been a non-executive director of British Rail; British Transport Hotels; Safeway; Argyll plc, the Leeds Permanent Building Society; Whitbread plc; Woolworths plc; the Halifax; Triven VCT; Omega International plc; and Belmond Hotels Ltd (formerly Orient Express Hotels) and is a director and investor in several start-up companies.

More recently in In February 2024, Leith's ten-part cookery series Prue Leith's Cotswold Kitchen began airing on ITV1. In September 2024, a second series was commissioned. In 2025, Leith participated in the The Masked Singer as "Pegasus", eliminated in the second episode.

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