A second chance romance about rebuilding a life from the ground up — a marriage, a career, and a family, brick by brick.

Ana Kowalska is fifty-three when her husband walks out, her job disappears, and a cancer diagnosis takes the rest of the year she thought she had planned. Everyone braces for her to fall apart.

She doesn't.

She rebuilds instead — one deliberately chosen life at a time. A shop stockroom in Dulwich. A Sunday morning rowing club at Putney. A building company she never expected to co-found with a steady, unshowy man named Robert, who fixes things without being asked twice.

Then a phone call changes everything again: a daughter her ex-husband never knew he had, found through a DNA test, twenty-eight years too late and exactly on time. A blended family that keeps, improbably, growing. A mother with strong opinions about all of it. And an ex-husband slowly, painfully learning what it costs to become someone worth forgiving.

Set across the real streets of South London — Herne Hill cafés, a Streatham kitchen table, the Thames path at Battersea — before following Ana all the way to a sun-warmed farmhouse in Puglia, Clear Margins is based on true events from the author's own life.

Perfect for readers who love:
— second chance romance with an older heroine,
— women's fiction about starting over after divorce,
— blended family and secret-child storylines,
— cancer survivor and redemption fiction,
— slow-burn romance set in London and Italy.

It is never too late to become someone new.