POPULAR FICTION
THE PEARL SISTER by Lucinda Riley (Macmillan £16.99)
i LoVe riley’s Seven Sisters novels, even if this doesn’t really scale the heights of its predecessors.
here’s the series backstory: an elusive billionaire adopted seven babies from around the globe. he has recently died (or has he?) and each girl has received clues to her background which help solve her present-day problems.
in this fourth instalment, CeCe, an aspiring if frustrated artist, finds herself in alice Springs following the trail of Kitty McBride, a Scottish clergyman’s daughter-turnedformidable businesswoman in the pioneer days of the 19th century.
as ever, riley handles the past-present flip-flop with skill, and there’s plenty of romance and exotic glamour. i especially liked the Thai beach bits, where CeCe falls for a handsome man of mystery.
if you like your stereotypes subverted, then riley’s not the writer for you; otherwise, this is near-700 pages of delicious reading.
THE STOLEN MARRIAGE by Diane Chamberlain
(Macmillan £14.99) TeSS is happily training as a nurse in Forties Baltimore, engaged to dishy doctor Vincent. Until, that is, she goes to washington with her freewheeling best friend gina, gets drunk and sleeps with a stranger.
Pregnant and ashamed, Tess leaves her hometown and returns to washington to ask for help from her seducer.
She’s not expecting henry to marry her, still less that he’s son and heir to an industrial fortune. But he does and he is and Tess finds herself in a nest of viperish, upmarket in-laws.
But henry is hiding something . . . i’d mostly guessed the big reveal, but the suspense is well-sustained and Chamberlain paints an interesting picture of the manners and mores of the wartime american home front.
MR DICKENS AND HIS CAROL by Samantha Silva
(Allison & Busby £12.99) ThiS clever, original debut brilliantly imagines the writing of a Christmas Carol.
it opens with Dickens staring down the barrel of financial and professional disaster. his novel Martin Chuzzlewit has tanked and his publishers are on his back demanding a Christmas hit. Bitter, twisted and devoid of inspiration, Dickens walks the seamy London streets while his wife and children blow what’s left of his money at home.
all seems lost, until he meets a beautiful, poor young woman who, with her frail, tiny son Timothy (geddit?), rekindles his creative flame, with immortal results.
it’s wildly moving, chock full of Dickensian atmosphere and written in a style as rich as a Victorian Christmas dinner.
it’s also full of clever jokes and clues; at one stage Dickens runs into a beggar boy desperate to be in one of his books. his name? David Copperfield.