Almost Heaven

Almost Heaven is a historical romance by Judith McNaught published by Pocket Books in 1990, and it belongs to the group of her novels that share the Westmoreland family. The book sets Elizabeth Cameron, an heiress whose gentleness is matched by a stubborn courage, against Ian Thornton, a man whose wealth and origins are both a mystery to the society that condemns him.

The story begins with a scandal: Elizabeth is found with Ian and her reputation is destroyed by the discovery, and the two are separated before anything can be settled between them. When their paths cross again, both have grounds for believing the worst of the other, and the novel works through suspicion, a forced arrangement and the slow accumulation of evidence about what each of them actually did.

McNaught writes in a period setting of drawing rooms and estates, and the emotional machinery of the book is the distance between what the two principal characters know and what the reader is shown. The later sections move the pair between London and the country and depend on the strain between Ian's secretive past and Elizabeth's position.