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Change Of Heart
Change Of Heart
Jan 11, 2026 7:19 PM

Author:Charlotte Bingham

Change Of Heart

This mesmerising love story form bestselling author Charlotte Bingham has it all: clever plotting, wonderful characterization, masterful writing and a totally unexpected and perfect finale: true perfection and perfect for readers of Louise Douglas, Dinah Jeffries and Kristin Hannah.

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CAN ONE CHANCE ENCOUNTER CHANGE THE COURSE OF A LIFE?

Visitors to Stoke Park in Worcestershire could be forgiven for thinking that the house had a timeless quality. Certainly this occurs to Frederick Jourdan, the American composer who has rented the place to escape from overwork and from his well-meaning but exhausting fiancée. He revels in the peace and beauty of the place, until, early one morning, he happens upon the heartstopping sight of the reclusive young occupant of the nearby Folly feeding deer at early dawn. He finds his life has been changed for ever.

Time has indeed stood still for Fleur Fisher-Dilke, but for reasons that can't be guessed. Born to an ambitious surgeon and his social-climbing wife, Fleur has only ever been seen as a tool to improve the family's social prospects.

Quite by chance, however, she finds she has a prodigious gift, and in spite of her parents' opposition, her talent blossoms. Choices are made, but not forgiven, and it is only when her life takes a sudden and tragic turn, and she meets a fascinating and irreverent figure who is her opposite in every way, that Fleur finds the courage she needs to move forward...

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'Her imagination is thoroughly original...A fairy tale, which is all the more delightful as it is not something one expects from a modern novel...It's heady stuff'' -- Daily Mail

'Charlotte Bingham's devotees will recognise her supreme skill as a storyteller...A heartwarming romance which is full of emotion.' -- INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

'Charlotte Bingham can't have written a better book than this one. Has anyone?' -- ***** Reader review

'No less than a masterpiece' -- ***** Reader review

'Compulsive reading!' -- ***** Reader review

'Truly impossible to put down' -- ***** Reader review

'Absolutely riveting' -- ***** Reader review

'A wonderful read' -- ***** Reader review

Reviews

'Her imagination is thoroughly original...A fairy tale, which is all the more delightful as it is not something one expects from a modern novel...It's heady stuff'

—— Daily Mail

Charlotte Bingham's devotees will recognise her supreme skill as a storyteller...A heartwarming romance which is full of emotion.

—— INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

This is a snarly group picaresque, a black comedy in which Gatwick airport is like Kafka's Castle in reverse... stifling, hilarious and indelible

—— Nora Chassler , Scottish Review of Books

Warner navigates the comic, the philosophical and the socially acute like no other writer we have

—— Independent

Vigorous and uncannily convincing... Readers would be sorry if Warner were to have finished with these characters

—— Daily Telegraph

You don't have to have read The Sopranos to make sense of The Stars in the Bright Sky, or to be instantly hooked by it

—— Observer

Highly-crafted, often beautiful writing

—— Irish Times

Readers would be sorry if Warner were to have finished with these characters

—— Tim Martin , Daily Telegraph

The author of The Sopranos catches up with the same cast of party-going wild girls, all beautifully imagined in pitch-perfect social satire

—— The Sunday Times Summer Reading

This entertaining comedy of manners

—— Adrian Turpin , Financial Times

Warner's comic depictions of the multiple tensions that run through the group finds its masterstroke in the grotesquely deluded yet impossible to dislike Manda, who is a neat satirical cipher for modern celebrity-obsessed culture. Terrific

—— Metro

Warner puts these very flesh-and-blood girls into locations of almost J G Ballardish sterility, with sodium lamps, flyovers and neon-signed hotels, all described beautifully. The way he manages to inhabit his gang of girls with such gusto is one of the small miracles of contemporary fiction

—— Phil Baker , Sunday Times

Pitch-perfect dialogue elevates this exhilarating, genuinely inspired novel into something that is, in Manda's phrase, 'dead brilliant'

—— Stephanie Cross , Daily Mail

Embedded in an unflinching portrayal or working-class femininity - all binge-drinking, chain-smoking, shrieking vulgarity and copious vomiting - is a brilliant anatomy of shifting group dynamics, many nods to Beckett's waiting games, and a sly engagement with Ballard's reading of airport space as the ultimate home of deracinated modernity

—— Chris Ross , Guardian

Warner is fascinated by the strange domesticity of 'non-places', and occasionally cranks up the alienation to describe their fixtures - literally, the light fixtures, room numbers and air-conditioning units - with a nouveau roman blankness... The most striking passages of the novel are in this clunky yet exoticising register, which inverts the technique of The Sopranos by making the warmth and fluency of the gang seem contained by the proprieties of adulthood. It brings with it a control-tower angle of vision that subtly distorts familiar language...

—— London Review of Books

Beautifully imagined in a pitch-perfect social satire

—— Sunday Times, Summer Reading
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