Author:Danielle Steel
The time is the 1950s, when life was simpler, people still believed in dreams, and family was, very nearly, everything. The place is a small midwestern town with a high school and a downtown, a skating pond and a movie house. And on a tree-lined street in the heartland of America, an extraordinary set of events begins to unfold. And gradually what seems serendipitous is tinged with purpose.
A happy home is shattered by a child's senseless death. A loving marriage starts to unravel. And a stranger arrives - a young woman who will touch many lives before she moves on. She and a young man will meet and fall in love. Their love, so innocent and full of hope, helps to restore a family's dreams. And all of their lives will be changed forever by the precious gift she leaves them.
Exquisite craftsmanship
—— GuardianAn exquisite novel about four sisters living though a turbulent decade, during the Forties and Fifties, I'd put it in the 10 greatest books of the 20th century
—— David Mitchell , Daily ExpressA complex, detailed and agreeably gossipy book...The author's obvious nostalgia for this vanished world does not prevent him from looking objectively at its darker side and this, together with his artful blend of the exotic and the mundane, creates an absorbing and richly textured story
—— Sunday TimesA subtle, moving novel
—— The TimesA classic novel of a whole country about to turn on the terrible hinge of the war into modernity; its tone is elegiac and bleak
—— ObserverThe work of Tanizaki offers to us in the West one of the most valuable keys to understanding the Japanese crisis of identity
—— IndependentAn extraordinary book which can truly be said to break new ground
—— New Yorker