Simply Divine - Softcover

Twentysomething magazine journalist Jane has enough stress--between breaking up with her boyfriend, falling in love with a man who leaves the country the next morning, and being generally bemused by her weight. The last thing Wendy Holden's heroine needs is glamorous socialite Champagne D'Vyne, who pops effervescently and annoyingly into her life. "Champagne's combination of stunning beauty and astounding vacuousness seemed to have struck some kind of chord with public and media alike. The Lost Chord, a despairing Jane supposed." Meanwhile, her best friend Tally's crumbling ancestral manse in Lower Bulge is about to be sold off unless Jane can find a rich knight to come to the rescue and, while she's at it, nab one for herself. Simply Divine sparkles with sharp, acerbic wit as the author pierces high society's extravagant pretensions and leaves the reader choking with laughter.

Tally always had had superior eyesight. This honing of the optics came, Jane imagined, courtesy of the genetic inheritance of generations of Venerys scanning the horizons of their vast acreage. Being grand, however, had its downside too. Like the girls at Fabulous, Tally had always suffered the most agonizing of periods. Blue blood was evidently more painful.

Holden launches the reader into a world of double-barreled socialites (including Pandora Smellie-Lewes, Princess Loulou Fischtitz, and Fluffy Fronte-Bottom) and the offices of the Gorgeous and Fabulous magazines where only girls with slim calves and tinted bikini lines get onto the front covers and, for that matter, through the front door. In her first satire Wendy Holden proves her superior social optics. --Nicola Perry

Journalist Wendy Holden is the former deputy editor of Tatler magazine. She has also worked at Harpers & Queen, The Sunday Times, and Sunday Telegraph, and is now at the Mail on Sunday. She lives in London, and is at work on her second novel for Plume, scheduled for publication in Summer 2000.