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.

Quentins - Maeve Binchy

Maeve Binchy is an ideal feelgood read - she has lively believable characters who get themselves into some remarkable tangles, emotional and financial in this book. All ends extremely well here, after adventures which take the main character, Ella, to Spain and New York.

Ella's ill-fated affair with a married man, a confidence trickster who reduces her parents and others to penury and then fakes his own death is the main plot. Ella finally confronts her conscience on this when she discovers he is still alive, and he claims his feelings for her were genuine.

She has learned from her mistakes. I guess this is one of the factors that contributes to the books making me feel good.

It's woven around the story of how a run down cafe becomes one of the top restaurants in Dublin. Plans to film the story are the motor for Ella's trip to NYC, but they are eventually abandoned because the owners and everyone else involved prefer not to face the disruption that fame would bring.