Overview

In the blockbuster storytelling tradition that is Barbara Taylor Bradford’s hallmark, here is an extraordinary novel about a remarkable young woman and the people whose lives she touches. At thirty-one Laura Valiant is a successful art historian who runs her own art advisory and acquisitions company. She and her husband Douglas Casson, a Wall Street lawyer, have a happy marriage marred only by the fact that they are still childless. But Laura’s life changes radically in 1997, when her best friend from childhood, Claire Benson, tells her she is dying. Claire, who is divorced, begs Laura to become her daughter Natasha’s guardian upon her death. Laura agrees and brings the fifteen-year-old girl to live with them in New York City after Claire dies. It is then that Laura’s troubles begin – with Natasha, with the girl’s father and grandmother, who suddenly reappear in her life, and with Douglas. Laura’s love and trust in her husband are shaken when she discovers he has a secret life apart from her. But it is her problems which force her to examine her own life, and this sets her on a path that inevitably leads her to a series of shattering truths. These revelations give Laura the chance to start a whole new life which promises to give her the happiness and fulfilment she craves. From the streets of Paris and London to the art galleries and art auctions of New York, A Sudden Change of Heart takes the reader on an unforgettable journey where secrets, survival, love and redemption mesmerize the reader from the first page to the last. This is Barbara Taylor Bradford’s fifteenth novel and it is told with the emotion and feeling readers have come to expect from one of the world’s most beloved authors.

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9780006510895

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Reviews

'Queen of the genre.' Sunday Times

`Queen of the genre.' Sunday Times

A listless sojourn in the social realm of ample income, accommodation, and achievement, as Bradford (Power of a Woman, 1997, etc.) visits such hot issues as art stolen from Holocaust victims, incest, and breast cancer. Though five years younger, Laura Valiant has known Claire Benson since their childhood, when her family moved into Claire's New York City apartment house. They spent their girlhood summers together on Laura's grandparents' farm in Connecticut. As the story opens in the mid-1990s, the two women are successful, wealthy, and mostly happy: Laura, married to the handsome Doug, is a partner in an art dealership. Claire, divorced and the editor of a French magazine, lives in Paris with her teenaged daughter Natasha. When they're reunited in Paris, Claire still seems angry with her former husband Phillippe Lavillard, a renowned doctor; she's also unnaturally thin. Laura, though her business is flourishing, worries about Doug, who seems strangely preoccupied. And sure enough, in the following year, their lives change: Laura learns that a painting sought by a client was taken by the Nazis from a Holocaust victim; her marriage ends; and when Claire arrives to spend the summer on the farm, she tells Laura that she's ill with terminal breast cancer, while also revealing for the first time that she was abused as a child (which may be why her own marriage failed?). After Claire's death, Laura, now Natasha's guardian, finds herself inexplicably drawn to Phillippe. She divorces Doug, who has a new love anyway, and discovers that Rosa, Phillippe's mother, is the daughter of a Jewish family, whose art was stolen by the Nazis. With an indefatigable lust for symmetry, Bradford sends Laura off to track the art down, and . . . . A tired (very tired) homage to sisterhood. (Kirkus Reviews)

`Queen of the genre.'Sunday Times

Author Information

Barbara Taylor Bradford was born in Leeds, and by the age of twenty was an editor and columnist on Fleet Street. Her first novel, A Woman of Substance, became an enduring worldwide bestseller. Her novels have sold more than eighty-five million copies worldwide in more than ninety countries and forty languages, and ten mini-series and television movies have been made of her books. She lives in New York City with her husband, television producer Robert Bradford.

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