Atlas

Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt is the eighth and final book in Lucinda Riley’s Seven Sisters series, the multigenerational historical fiction project that has spanned more than a decade of work and become one of the most ambitious series in contemporary commercial historical fiction. The first seven books each followed one of the seven adopted Deplessis sisters as she traveled the world to discover the truth about her own birth family, with the wider mystery of who their adoptive father Pa Salt actually was running through every book as the connecting thread. Atlas finally tells Pa Salt’s own story.

Lucinda Riley passed away in 2021 with the final book unfinished, and her son Harry Whittaker completed the manuscript based on her notes and outlines. The novel moves between Pa Salt’s childhood in Russia in the years following the revolution, his long and unusual life across the twentieth century, and the contemporary frame in which the seven sisters finally come to understand the man who raised them. The reveals about Pa Salt’s identity, his real name, his connections to historical events that shaped the twentieth century, and the reasons he adopted seven daughters from around the world all converge in this final volume.

Lucinda Riley wrote a kind of accessible, glossy historical fiction that drew on real international settings and on the multigenerational family secrets her readers loved. The Seven Sisters books have brought millions of readers into the dual timeline historical fiction subgenre, with each volume rendering a different historical period and a different geographical setting with the kind of careful research and careful storytelling that became her signature. Atlas brings this enormous project to a conclusion that fans of the series have been waiting for through every book.

For longtime Seven Sisters readers, Atlas is essential. The wait between the seventh book and this final volume was painful, made more so by Riley’s death, and Harry Whittaker’s completion of the manuscript carries both the weight of the project and the bittersweet awareness that this is the last time readers will hear from the Deplessis family. For new readers, the series rewards being read in order from the beginning with The Seven Sisters.