& Dazzling The combination of lightness warmth & remarkable incisiveness creates a novel that is life-affirming & compulsively readable& Sunday Times It is 1964 Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating&s christening party uninvited & notices a heart stoppingly beautiful woman When he kisses Beverly Keating his host&s wife he sets in motion the joining of two families whose shared fate will be defined on a day seven years later In 1988 Franny Keating now twenty-four is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago When she meets the famous author Leon Posen one night at the bar & tells him about her family she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story