Sarah Bevan Fischer

The Bennet sisters are wildly different, products of a marriage in terminal decay. Emerald is loosely based on the famous and much loved classic precursor Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Emerald echoes the 200-year-old novel but is widely different and is how I imagine the story may pan out in the 21st century.

The story follows the lives of the five daughters of the Bennet family. Jade is completing her nursing training and has elected to move home to Oxford for her final year. Emy (short for Emerald, yes Mrs Bennet did go through a phase) finishes University and returns home for the holidays with her best friend Scarlett Lucas. Meanwhile Jade and Emy’s younger two siblings, Lara and Kylie aspire to celebrity status through that TV talent show, shamelessly encouraged by their mother. The middle sister Meg Ann lectures her siblings from the moral high ground at every opportunity.

Scarlett invites Emy and Jade down to the Lucas family’s holiday home in Cornwall where the girls are invited to lunch with long time friends of Scarlett’s parents. Scarlett has had a crush on Ashley Brooks for years. During the holiday the girls are thrown in the way of Ashley’s seriously wealthy and rather pompous cousin, Matthew Brooks Devonshire and his best friend Sam Bradford.

Jade and Sam are immediately attracted to each other. Emy, conversely, forms the opinion that Matthew is an egotistical snob and eschews his company in favour of an actor, Zachary Winchester whom she meets at a beach barbecue. Oddly Matthew and Zachary appear to have met before….

Tensions run high between the rivals inadvertently stoked by Emy's innocent flirtation and Amelia Bradford's jealous slander. When Emy and Matt meet once more in different circumstances Emy comes to realise that her prejudice against him may have been ill founded.
In the second part of A Universal Truth (Based on marvelous Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice) it is five years later. Emy has forged a successful career in New York and Matt has reestablished the Pemblane estate on an even footing. Both have faced their demons and moved on. Each of them dream of the other and are drawn towards each other with a magnetic force.

At the end of the first book, Emerald, the unraveling of the Bennet family, her sister's drug addiction and her parent's separation and ultimate divorce, distresses Emy. Matt is equally challenged by his father's death and the circumstances that surround it. Could Zach and he be half-brothers?

The ghosts of Pemblane trouble Emy. She is afraid of the strange connection that she feels to the 200-year-old Elizabeth, and the parallels of her own love story with Matt, and Elizabeth's with the Matthew of the past.

Everything that occurs in the spring of 2013 is drawing Emy back to Pemblane, to face the inevitability of her attraction to Matt. Will they finally be united in the passion that they both feel for the other? Can Emy face the past and move forward without being damaged by the ghosts of Matt's ancestors?