Author:Danielle Steel
As Diana Morrison laid the table for six at her elegant Central Park apartment, she had no warning of what was to come. Spending New Year's Eve together was a tradition for Diana, her husband Eric, and their best friends Pascale and John Donnally and Anne and Robert Smith, and as the friends sipped champagne, they talked of renting a villa together in the South of France the following summer. But life had other plans...
Just two weeks after New Year, tragedy strikes at the heart of their close circle as Robert suffers a sudden, tragic loss. Diana and Eric, Pascale and John, united in their love and shared grief, rally to his side and urge him to join them on the Riviera in August. But the ramshackle old mansion is far from the exquisite villa they had imagined, and Robert surprises them all by inviting a lovely, much-younger film actress with mile-long legs and a million-dollar smile. Diana and Pascale hate her on sight, but the men are dazzled, and amidst the crumbling furniture and glorious sunsets more surprises are in store. Old wounds are healed, new love discovered, and miracles unfold... all beneath the dazzling sun of St Tropez.
The Discworld novels have always been among the most serious of comedies, the most relevant and real of fantasies
—— IndependentFunny, delightfully inventive, and refuses to lie down in its genre
—— ObserverWarm, silly, compulsively readable, fantastically inventive, surprisingly serious exploration in story form of just about any aspect of our world
—— Evening StandardStill extraordinary, still brilliant
—— MetroEven at a time when so many good and interesting novels are coming out, hers stand out as performances of real originality and extraordinary promise
—— John BayleyWonderful rites-of-passage novel... where the author's blossoming Sapphic nature leads her to eschew her mothers proffered favourite
—— Mariella FrostrupIt is very funny, with an Alan Bennett sort of humour, beautifully written, quirky and likely to cause much tuttutting in conservative quarters
—— Daily MailThis lesbian coming of age story set in northern England doesn't seem to have aged a bit
—— IndependentAn instant classic
—— Rosemary Goring , HeraldYou'll find everything you need to know about mustering the courage to embrace your true self and live life without fear in Winterson's hugely engaging semi-autobiographical novel
—— Mariella Frostrup , Sunday Times