Description

A “warm, affecting tale” (People) about a ghostwriter learning lessons in life and love from her eccentric and viviacious subject.

When Harriet Mahoney first sees it, Isabel Krug’s bed is covered with sheared sheep and littered with celebrity biographies. Unpublished, fortyish, and recently jilted, Harriet has fled Manhattan for Isabel’s loudly elegant Cape Cod retreat, where she will ghostwrite The Isabel Krug Story, based on the sexy blond’s scandalous tabloid past. Unusually “talented” in the man department, Isabel revamps and inspires Harriet as they gear up to tell all, including the tangled history Isabel shares with her odd lodger, Costas. Life according to Isabel is a nonstop soap opera extravaganza, an experience to be swallowed whole and the attitude is catching.

About the author(s)

Elinor Lipman is the award-winning author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Inn at Lake DevineIsabel’s Bed, and more. Her first novel, Then She Found Me, was adapted into a film directed by and starring Helen Hunt, with Bette Midler, Colin Firth, and Matthew Broderick. She divides her time between Manhattan and the Hudson Valley.

Reviews

Chicago Tribune If Jane Austen had been born about two centuries later...chances are she'd have written like Elinor Lipman.... One of the last of the urbane romantics.

Carolyn See The Washington Post Book World By about page ten of this novel, the reader gets a...grin on his face, and that grin doesn't really stop for about a week.

San Francisco Chronicle Delightful....Engaging....The perfect companion....After a short while, these characters become more vivid than one's own friends.

People A warm, affecting tale about one smart woman letting go of her dumb choices and fumbling toward love....