Synopses & Reviews
A number-one bestseller from one of Britain's most popular novelists, Sheer Abandon is an all-consuming story revolving around the consequences of a desperate act...
Martha, Clio, and Jocasta meet by chance at Heathrow airport in 1985 as they are starting off on separate backpacking adventures, and they decide to spend the first few days of their trips together in Thailand. When they go their separate ways, they vow to get together in London the following year. But many years pass before the three cross paths again, and the once-capricious, carefree girls now all have thriving careers. One of them, however, harbors a terrible secret: On her return from her pre-college excursion, she abandoned her just-born daughter at Heathrow.
Clio has fulfilled her ambition of becoming a doctor, only to find herself trapped in a marriage to an arrogant surgeon who belittles her and her professional achievements. Martha is a highly paid corporate lawyer, just embarking on a political career. Dedicated to her job, she has had little time for personal relationships and lives a busy, but lonely life. Jocasta, a tabloid newspaper reporter with an infallible instinct for the big story, is in love with a charming colleague who can't make the permanent commitment she longs for. The infant abandoned at Heathrow has grown up under the loving care of her adoptive family. Now a beautiful teenager named Kate, she sets out to find her birth mother a quest that unexpectedly brings the women together and exposes the secret buried so many years before.
Impossible to put down, Sheer Abandon is top-notch women's fiction.
Review
"It's time Americans caught Vincenzi fever, because it's almost a crime she's not better known here....Everything is outsized in Vincenzi's fiction: sex, money, personality, emotions, plot. And yet she gets all the details about human behavior and women's conflicted lives just right. It's perfect escapism." USA Today
Review
"She's the plot-twist queen." Adriana Trigiani, author of the Big Stone Gap trilogy and The Queen of the Big Time
Review
"[An] especially accessible book....Ms. Vincenzi creates reasonably credible people. She seems genuinely to enjoy their joys, their sorrows and their company." Janet Maslin, New York Times
Review
"Lush, light and deliciously long...the perfect sink-into-summer novel." Cleveland Plain Dealer
Review
"[An] absorbing tale rich in seductive intrigue and emotional impact." Booklist
Review
"More compact than five seasons of soap operas, but equally brain-curdling." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
Three young women met at the start of their student travels; one of them abandoned a baby girl at Heathrow a year later. Kate, now a beautiful teenager, sets out to find her birth mother a quest that unexpectedly brings the women together and exposes this long-buried secret.
About the Author
Penny Vincenzi is the author of several novels, including No Angel, Something Dangerous, and Into Temptation. Before becoming a novelist, she worked as a journalist for Vogue, Tatler, and Cosmopolitan. She lives in London.
Reading Group Guide
1. We join Martha, Jocasta, and Clio at Heathrow Airport a year before a baby is born to, and abandoned by, one of them. And then get to know them a little better in the early chapters. Purely on the basis of their personalities, which of them seemed the most likely to have done something so shocking and wretched: and why?
2. Did you guess correctly? Did you spot the qualities that made such a course of action possible? And if you were wrong, what specific things misled you?
3. English politics, an essential ingredient of the book in the struggle for power are very idiosyncratic; the personal politics of several of the characters could well be described as equally so. Yet the less ambitious characters, eg. Helen, Kates adoptive mother, and Nat, her boyfriend, have been declared some of the more multi dimensional characters in the book. Would you agree with this and if so why?
4. It could be argued either that Jocasta acted completely against her own character, in marrying Gideon Keeble; or that it was in absolute accord with her desire for love and security. Which do you think?
5. Kate is deeply distressed by the loss of Martha, when she had spent her whole life railing against her, why do you think this is?
6. Female friendships can be very complex. What do you suppose drove Martha, Clio and Jocast apart? Have you lost touch with a friend and re-connected with that person later in life?