The Christmas Promise

The Christmas Promise is Sue Moorcroft's festive novel about Ava, a milliner making bespoke hats and barely making rent. Her ex-boyfriend is a bully, work is thin, and Christmas is bearing down on her. On a snowy December evening Sam Jermyn commissions a hat, and the promise Ava makes to finish it sets the rest of the book in motion.

Alongside the romance, Moorcroft writes a sharp thread about the damage that can be done online, and how little control a person has once private material is out of their hands. It gives the book a harder edge than its cover suggests, without ever tipping out of the warm, hopeful register readers come to her for.

Millinery is rendered in real detail, and the novel's centre of gravity is friendship and rebuilding as much as it is falling in love.