Pre-numbered label used for registration.

paperback
503pp
published, 2001

FROM OUR EDITORS
Elfrida Phipps's untroubled life in a Hampshire village is cut to shreds when members of her neighbor's family die in a car crash, but, in a way this tragedy redeems her life. The warmth of this English domestic novel is reinforced by its closely delineated characters. Even Horace, the faithful dog, comes alive for us.

FROM THE PUBLISHER
The wait is over for the millions of readers who fell in love with Rosamunde Pilcher's compelling novels filled with riveting storylines and unforgettable characters. Now, New York Times bestselling author Rosamund Pilcher, has returned, giving her legion of fans another tale of love, loyalty, and rebirth...

Elfrida Phipps, once on the London stage and retired at 62, never anticipates going off with a man. But after a devastating tragedy, church organist Oscar Blundell asks for her companionship. So with her brown-and-white dog in tow, Elfrida begins her journey, not knowing that joining her and Oscar at a rundown Victorian house in Scotland will be a young woman nursing a broken heart, a teenager escaping an unhappy home, and a stranger arriving during a snowstorm... Now these five, very different people form an unexpected circle of friends that will forever change their lives...

Author Biography ROSAMUNDE PILCHER is the author of such worldwide bestsellers as The Shell Seekers, September, and Coming Home. She lives with her husband, Graham, and their dog, Daisy, in Perthshire, Scotland.

FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
The enduringly popular Pilcher (Coming Home, 1995, etc.) holds fast to a theme that has all but disappeared from American fiction: the healing comforts of domesticity and companionship. As winter sets in, an old estate in rural Scotland becomes a temporary home to an unlikely assemblage: Elfrida Phipps, a gently eccentric former actress; her friend Oscar Blundell, a dedicated musician and recent widower; Elfrida's distant relation, Carrie Sutton, an independent young woman recovering from the heartbreak of a failed love affair with a married man; teenaged Lucy, Carrie's quiet niece, who yearns to escape from her grandmother's London flat; and Sam Howard, a handsome textile-company executive whose American wife has just left him. As always, Pilcher is a sensible fairy godmother, bestowing happy endings upon the worthy and heartsick, while keeping the less agreeable characters on the other side of the Atlantic, where they evidently belong. The damp charms of the Scottish countryside are tenderly described; and the author's remarkably evocative sense of place and watercolorist's eye for muted detail help distract from the usual contrivances of a Pilcher plot (the unexpected legacy, the valuable heirloom sold to make a new beginning, etc.). In this little realm, this England, the men are sincere and the tweeds handwoven. Tea? (Literary Guild main selection/Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection) Literary Guild main selection/Book-of-the-Month alternate selection

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