The Seven Sisters

The Seven Sisters is the first novel in Lucinda Riley's bestselling series of the same name, published in 2014. It opens as Maia D'Aplièse and her five sisters gather at Atlantis, their childhood home on the shores of Lake Geneva, after learning that their beloved adoptive father, an elusive billionaire they call Pa Salt, has died. Each sister is left a clue to her true origins, and Maia's leads her across the world to a crumbling mansion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she begins to piece together where her story truly began.

The book unfolds across a dual timeline, weaving Maia's present-day quest together with a parallel historical narrative set in the early twentieth century, when a young woman named Izabela Bonifacio travels from Brazil to Paris and encounters a sculptor whose work is bound up with the making of Rio's famous Christ the Redeemer statue. Riley's central themes are identity, heritage, family, and the ways the past shapes the present, as an adopted daughter reaches back through generations to understand who she is.

The series as a whole is loosely inspired by the mythology of the Pleiades, the star cluster known as the Seven Sisters, with each subsequent novel following a different sister's search for her roots. The Seven Sisters launched what became a worldwide publishing phenomenon spanning eight books, and it remains one of the most widely read works of the late Lucinda Riley, whose sweeping, globe-spanning storytelling won her a large international readership.