Overview

From the internationally bestselling author of A Woman of Substance Three generations of beautiful women and their journey from rags to riches Audra is an impoverished children’s nanny from Leeds who sacrificed everything for her only daughter. Christina is a talented art student who won world renown as a fashion designer – yet who has known pain and heartache. Kyle is a rebellious young woman who chafes against her mother’s success – and in whom her grandmother’s spirit of duty and sacrifice is reborn. Moving from the Yorkshire Dales, through London, to the glamorous world of haute couture, Act of Will sparkles as it entertains.

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9780586058503

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Reviews

'Pure gold - a runaway bestseller.' Cosmopolitan

From the author of the deservedly popular A Woman of Substance (1979), this bland, trudging story of three generations of stubborn women is pure going-through-the-motions formula writing without the slightest leavening of wit or passion. The story begins in Woman of Substance territory - Yorkshire, England, in the early 1920's - where a child of genteel poverty, plucky young Audra Kenton, is forced by almost Dickensian circumstance (the early deaths of her parents, a cruel-hearted aunt) into the working world; she takes a job as a nanny with a well-to-do Leeds family and there meets construction worker Vincent Crowther, who is beneath her station but looks like Robert Taylor - five months later they're married and she's regretting it, since he likes to hang out with the boys and runs to his mother at the first sign of trouble. But after the birth of their daughter Christina in 1931 (an earlier child had died of meningitis), Audra is stricken with new purpose: through an act of will she will give Christina everything she herself has been denied (faced with this maternal determination, Vincent clears his throat a few times and begins to gray charmingly at the temples - the fate of most of Bradford's married men). World War II passes (blink and you miss it) and it's 1951. The story now belongs to Christina, who through her mother's scrimping and saving and backbreaking labor has just been admitted to the Royal College of Art in London - the plan is for her to become a brilliant landscape painter. But when Audra falls ill due to overwork, Christina decides to chuck it all and make some bucks as a designer; almost overnight she becomes a superstar in the international fashion firmament and is able to take care of a protesting Audra in style. The only interesting complication of the book arises when Christina becomes pregnant by a married M.P., but Bradford deus ex machinas her way out of it with unseemly haste (a freak car accident causes a miscarriage) and sends Christina to New York, where she marries a shrewd businessman who makes her a house-hold word. The novel is framed by a 1978 Prologue and Epilogue that show Christina's 19-year old daughter, Kyle, refusing to go to work in her mother's fashion empire - she will become a famous landscape painter. Full circle, and not soon enough. This is billed as a three-generational saga, but more than half of its zestless expanse is devoted to Audra, who is a drone; Bradford hurries through Christina, and Kyle is just an afterthought (but beware the lurking sequel). (Kirkus Reviews)

'Pure gold -- a runaway bestseller.' Cosmopolitan

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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