E-book
A sudden change of heart [electronic resource] / Barbara Taylor Bradford.
New York art dealer Laura Valiant flies to Paris to investigate artwork stolen by the Nazis and meets up with Claire Benson, editor of an art magazine and an old childhood friend. The women have marital problems-- Valiant's husband turns out to be bisexual--and the novel describes the way they support each other.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780307491442 (electronic bk. : Adobe Digital Editions)
- ISBN: 0307491447 (electronic bk. : Adobe Digital Editions)
- Publisher: New York : Dell Pub., 2008.
Content descriptions
| General Note: | Title from eBook information screen. "A Dell book." |
| System Details Note: | Requires OverDrive Media Console Requires Adobe Digital Editions (file size: 2250 KB). |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Women art dealers > Fiction. World War, 1939-1945 > Art and the war > Fiction. Female friendship > Fiction. New York (N.Y.) > Fiction. Paris (France) > Fiction. |
| Genre: | EBOOK. Love stories. Electronic books. |
Other Formats and Editions
Electronic resources
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Monthly Selections - #1 January 1999
Best-selling author Bradford's new novel will certainly please fans of her particular brand of contemporary women's fiction. Set in Europe and America, the story follows the once happy and innocent childhood shared by Laura Valiant and Claire Benson and the angst-ridden lives they are currently leading as adults. When Laura, an American art dealer, heads to Paris to purchase some rare paintings, she meets up with her old friend Claire, who is divorced from her husband, a French scientist, and is nursing an inexplicable hatred for him. As Laura begins an investigation into artwork stolen by the Nazis during World War II, her own marriage slowly crumbles, and when Claire discovers she has a terminal illness, the two women find that they need each other more than ever. Like many of the author's previous novels, this one is ultimately a tale of triumph over extreme adversity. Bradford's work is very popular, and many of her novels have been turned into television miniseries; libraries should purchase several copies of her latest. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1999)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 1999 January #2
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. (Author tour) Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1998 October #1
Art dealer Laura finds herself investigating the family of a best friend's ex-husband, who may be implicated in the sale of artworks stolen by the Nazis. Copyright 1998 Library Journal Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1999 February #1
Bradford's latest offering covers familiar territorythe playgrounds, decor, and travails of the rich and famous. It is the adventures of Laura Valiant, art adviser, that concern the reader in this soap-opera-in-a-book-jacket. Laura's marriage disintegrates, her best childhood friend battles cancer, and she becomes embroiled in an international art scandal of historic proportions, all the while holding herself together remarkably wellalmost too well to believe. The novel suffers from too much unnatural dialog, and short, often choppy scenes make it appear that Bradford is writing not a novel but the script for a miniseries. Still, the book is not without its compensationsit's fun to read about wealthy, famous, and otherwise successful people jetting between New York, L.A., and Paris, and Bradford has a gift for opulent settings. Beach reading, not high art; purchase accordingly. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/98.]Bettie Alston Shea, P.L. of Charlotte & Mecklenburg Cty., NC Copyright 1999 Library Journal Reviews - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 1999 January #1
Another version of the indefatigable, headstrong heroine that's been Bradford's trademark since she first published A Woman of Substance 20 years ago appears here in a watered-down version as Laura Valiant, a New York art dealer who specializes in impressionist and post-impressionist works. Laura has what she thinks is a storybook marriage, and her closest childhood friend, Claire Benson, now publisher and editor-in-chief of a French interior design and art magazine, offers contrast as a bitter, divorced woman who dotes on her teenage daughter. Bradford's exploration of the relationship between the two women depicts a series of heartbreaks and scandals, most with more surface than substance. Claire's hidden past of childhood abuse, foreshadowed early in the book, makes the other characters appear obtuse for missing obvious clues. Meanwhile, Laura's "perfect" husband turns out to be bisexual, Claire's difficult ex-husband reappears in her daughter's life and Claire ends up confronting advanced breast cancer and battling for her life with Laura's loving support. The book tackles these all-too-familiar issues with a kind of stilted preachiness, and with often repetitive dialogue and a formulaic romance involving Laura and Claire's ex-husband. Contemporary headlines about Holocaust survivors demanding the return of Nazi-looted, privately owned works of art that surfaced in museums and private collections forms an important part of the plot, but Bradford's material on this controversial subject reads more like a newspaper article than an integrated theme. The saving grace in this, her 15th novel, is an echo of the memorable Emma Harte from Bradford's debut publication in Laura's grandmother, Megan Valiant, a strong-willed, charismatic woman who, with her colorful past and candid wisdom, will strike most readers as the real heroine of the saga. National author "High Tea" tour. (Feb.) FYI: This novel marks Bradford's return to Doubleday after several books with HarperCollins. Copyright 1999 Publishers Weekly Reviews
