Palace Of The Pomegranate

Palace of the Pomegranate is a 1974 Mills & Boon romance by Violet Winspear, published as a 190-page paperback.

Grace Wilde is a society figure with a title and a fortune, and the novel opens by insisting that none of it has made her happy. She was pressed into a marriage with Tony Wilde, who is described as uncaring and unfaithful, and her public glamour is therefore a cover for a private situation she did not choose. An expedition into the Persian desert removes her from all of that and puts her in the hands of Kharim Khan. She has youth, beauty, a title and money, and none of it is hers to direct, because the marriage that gave her the position was arranged for her rather than chosen.

The question the publisher poses is whether he can melt the ice she has built up, and the second question is whether she could ever matter to a man whose world is not hers. It is a short romance of the 1970s aimed at the same readers as Winspear's other titles, with an exotic setting and a closed emotional problem, and it is one of many such novels Mills & Boon published in that decade.