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THE WINTER WOMEN by Mary-Rose Hayes

THE WINTER WOMEN

By

Pub Date: Nov. 23rd, 1987
Publisher: Dutton

Three star-crossed English sisters find their fortunes in America, in Hayes' bright, vivid, well-written commercial debut. Now is the winter of their discontent. . .Isobel, Christian, and Arran Winter have spent their young lives drifting from town to town with their parents, in genteel poverty. Father George is a drug addict and a mental case, a failed poet who can never hold a job for long. When they get the opportunity to head for America, the luscious siblings jump at it. Isobel and Christian arrive in 1970; Isobel hooks up with budding superagent Davis Whittaker and gradually becomes a major movie star. Christian's route is more circular: she's discovered by a tycoon who marries her off to a Swiss banker who turns out to be a sexual deviant--and when he dies, Christian is left with money but no love. Young Arran is the strangest of the bunch--abused by her father at a tender age, she fulfills her taste for heavy sade-masochism while living in San Francisco and writing best-selling novels. The 80's find the sisters in flux: Arran, helped by a kindly priest, is still fighting off her urge to subjugate herself to mechanized infantry divisions; Christian is having a bitter love affair with a Caribbean drug runner named Ludo; and Isobel. . .well, lsobel is a bigger star then ever, but has twins out of wedlock (who's the father?) and secretly pines for David Whittaker, who has married another. But the novel will end auspiciously for the women--even though, after their father's suicide, their mother calls them back to England to reveal an extremely dark, exceedingly deep secret. . . Plenty of corn, but not the usual hash: a sexy potboiler with clever stereotyping, oodles of action, and a sense of humor.