On a cool night in Memphis, high on a grassy hilltop, Elvis Presley fell in love with a beautiful French teenager with sparkling green eyes, a melting smile—and a haunted existence. This love ignited a passionate romance hidden from the world for twenty-four years.

When they met in 1953, Lucy de Barbin was a troubled seventeen-year-old who begged God nightly to free her form a physically and psychologically tortured life. Elvis Presley was an eighteen-year-old dreamer filled with an intense desire that would fuel an unparalleled rise to fame, fortune, and eventually to a legendary status too heavy to bear. Their love was born of necessity, grew in secrecy, and was fraught with impossibilities. Yet for nearly a quarter of a century, it remained unbending.

Elvis inspired Lucy to shake off the chains of despair and hopelessness and free herself form a brutal husband foisted upon her at age eleven by an old-world immigrant family. She repaid him by sacrificing herself and her love so he could initially achieve, and then maintain, the fame he cherished.

She gave birth to his first child, but her desire to shield Elvis from scandal forced her to conceal their baby. And to conceal the father from the child. The single legacy that Lucy allowed their daughter was her name, Desiree. This was the endearment Elvis bestowed upon Lucy; the name he chose as the most romantic way to express his love.

Though Lucy ran from Elvis to protect him, he always found her. They met secretly in parks, by the banks of rivers and ponds, and in hotel rooms across the country. They talked. They laughed. They cried. They made love. They prayed for a future together.

When the roles were reversed and Elvis was emotionally crumbling, Lucy was there. Her love comforted him in the fog of his final years and provided an intermittent oasis that might have given Elvis the only peace he ever knew. But Lucy’s scars never completely healed. Driven by her protective instincts and terrified by a past that could never be forgotten, she delayed in agreeing to the marriage Elvis had intently pursued from the beginning.

In Are You Lonesome Tonight? is a heartbreaking recounting that reveals who Elvis Presley really was. Through Lucy’s eyes, we learn his deepest longings, experience his greatest victories and painful disappointments, and finally understand why he was so lonely, unhappy, and empty. It is a tragic and touching love story—the most compelling portrait of the “King” ever published.