No One But You

No One but You is a fictional account of a young girl’s extraordinary life, from the post-war East End of London to the high life of America and back again. It portrays Tessa Levy’s yearning for adventure and opportunity and ultimately love on both sides of the Atlantic. She is the youngest child of a large family who takes on the responsibility of caring for her beloved dying mother. When her father secretly marries another woman, Tessa’s world is shattered. At the tender age of 17, Tessa seeks solace with her distant cousins in America and sets off on the adventure of a lifetime.A year and a half later, she returns to England as a glamorous young women having fallen in love for the first time. However, she crosses the cultural divide and struggles to resettle, despite her family’s best efforts to reintegrate her into their Jewish community in London. Eventually meeting the man she will marry, Tessa suffers another painful premature family death that rocks her world. She embarks on motherhood and a successful career but life continues to challenge her happiness. She finds herself torn between the two loves of her life; the handsome, poetic and artistic Gus in America; and the charismatic, successful, but disloyal Michael in England. Her romantic adventure crosses back and forth between the two countries ultimately in the quest to find the answer to the underlying theme of the book, and Tessa’s life; is it possible to love two men in one lifetime?

Tessa Levy was born in the East End of London as the youngest of six children in a Jewish family; Russian immigrants to England before the Second World War. Experiencing two life-changing traumas at a young age had a profound effect on her life. Today the author lives in London, overlooking Hyde Park and maintains one foot on each side of the pond.