As part of Faber's Secrets and Lies series comes a beguiling novel of deception and deviousness.Scotland, 1863. In an attempt to escape her not-so-innocent past in Glasgow, Bessy Buckley - the wide-eyed Irish heroine of The Observations - takes a job as a maid in a big house outside Edinburgh working for the beautiful Arabella. Bessy is intrigued by her new employer, but puzzled by her increasingly strange requests and her insistence that Bessy keep a journal of her most intimate thoughts. And it seems that Arabella has a few secrets of her own - including her near obsessive affection for Nora, a former maid who died in mysterious circumstances.About The AuthorJane Harris was born in Belfast and brought up in Glasgow. Her debut novel, The Observations, was short-listed for the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, and she was also short-listed for the British Book Awards Waterstone's Newcomer of the Year and the South Bank Show Times Breakthrough Award. She lives in London with her husband Tom.