Romantic love and its power to shake a woman's life at any age is the subject of this new novel by Marilyn French. At the center, Hermione Beldame, in her sixties, a writer of romance novels (eighty-seven of them, an average of two a year for forty years). She is rich, sophisticated, self-made, often di-vorced, long widowed, and long finished with the notion of romantic love as a part of her life. Until, one day, at a party - she sees across the room an attractive man who finds his way to her. What begins as a charming conversation between two strangers develops into much more (and much less) as the novel charts the course of a brief encounter that disrupts the equilibrium - the hard-won serenity - of its heroine, seizing her heart and her life during her summer with George.

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