Maeve Binchy - Circle of Friends

Another feelgood - but she certainly makes her characters live in my head, and her plots are well constructed. A picture of the changing society in Ireland, conflicts of old and new, a worldy-wise nun, two very different gold-diggers who come to grief or at least to reality, a decaying aristocratic family with a disowned wayward daughter, and the central friendship between two girls who grow up together in a small town and then Dublin.