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The
Duke’s Secret
She is a young maid in a stately home; he is a dashing British army officer trapped in an unhappy marriage. Just as he is departing for war, they surrender to their passion.
Two hundred years later, a woman investigates a family legend that they’re the descendants of a daughter born to an unwed maid in the Duke of Wellington’s London household. What she discovers shocks everyone.
Released by Allen & Unwin, February 2026.
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The Duke’s Secret
A young woman investigates a family legend that they’re the descendants of a daughter born to an unwed maid in the Duke of Wellington’s London household. What she discovers shocks everyone.
About Sue Williams
Sue Williams is a best-selling author and an award-winning journalist and travel writer. She’s been writing all her life and is passionate about telling people’s stories in the most compelling way she can, bringing their worlds, and their words, vividly home to readers.
Sue’s latest book The Duke’s Secret, blends her established skills as a journalist and researcher with her known facility with historical fiction as she takes us on a journey to the stately homes of England in search of the truth behind a genuine family legend. The story is that her father is descended from a liaison between the Duke of Wellington, conqueror of Napoleon, and a maid in his household. The historical facts are undeniable, the fiction becomes more real with every page as the irrefutable evidence builds up.
Sue is a masterful writer of historical fiction, praised for both her meticulous research and her empathic treatment of characters, particularly women, brought back from the shadowy reaches of the past into the spotlight. Her Australian series, Elizabeth & Elizabeth, about the Elizabeths Macquarie and Macarthur, That Bligh Girl about Mary Bligh the daughter of notorious governor and mutiny survivor William Bligh, and in 2025, The Governor, His Wife and His Mistress about the tangled love life of Philip Gidley King, have all proved best sellers.
She’s also written a huge swathe of non-fiction books, from biography to true crime, from travel to a number of books about the Outback. At the same time, she continues her career as a newspaper and magazine journalist, and travels widely to report on life in some of the farthest-flung corners of the earth.
Originally from England, but now calling Australia home, she lives in Sydney with her partner, crime novelist James Dunbar otherwise known as Jimmy Thomson, and their cats, River and Trotsky, who remain steadfastly unimpressed by anything they do.
