Steel’s latest novel touches on a familiar subject

DANIELLE Steel has sold a staggering 1 billion copies of her novels and it’s easy to see why.

They are popular among a reading public eager to be swept away, largely to another world, away from the challenges that exist, particularly these days.

A prolific writer, she has penned literally scores of best-selling novels that in her long life have afforded her the wealth to divide her time between Paris and northern California.

Steel’s latest, Nine Lives, touches on a familiar topic – the issue of being adventurous and daring or living a lesser life of being cautious, yet safe.

In the protagonist, Maggie Kelly, we find a woman who, having loved and lost a father and brother because of their bravado, overcompensates by becoming cautious to the extreme.

By the age of 8, with a father in the US Air Force, Maggie and her family have moved around the country to four military bases.

But her carefree childhood changes irrevocably when her dashing father is killed on a flying mission.

Her grieving mother must pick up the pieces and raise her and her brother alone and the sense of playing it safe becomes deeply instilled in them by her mother.

So when she falls in love with Paul, the daredevil kid from the wrong side of town who rides his motorbike too fast, she reluctantly discards him.

She ties the knot with Brad – a reliable, dependable guy and eventually grows to love him for those very reasons – he is no risk-taker and he's always going to be there. A stolid life; one of suburban predictability.

But tragedy strikes on a muchplanned holiday when their plane crashes and Brad dies.

Her deep grieving however, is broken when Maggie finds out that she has inherited more money than she could ever imagine. She goes on the trip of life time.

Her trip reconnects her with the man she tried to forget from 30 years ago, the thrill-seeking Paul.

Yet again, Maggie, now older and wiser, needs to do a balancing act between love and courage; wisdom and sense.