Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy

Orion €23.40
MAEVE Binchy, founder of Irish chicklit, has written the book that will steal Christmas.
These loosely linked stories fan out from the central theme of a struggling new heart clinic. Here, kindness and hard work are rewarded and the bad punished. Very satisfying.
Some of the stories are amazing. My favourite is about the priest stalked by a determined woman ready to lie, blackmail and steal to get her way - and about how his friends get him out of this scrape.
It's laugh-out-loud funny, it's heartwarming, and it's a pageturner. And for fans, some of the characters from earlier Binchy hits make a new appearance here - like the staff of Quentins, and the ditsy twins from Scarlet Feather.
The new characters are some of Binchy's best. Anya, a sweet, tough-minded Polish girl, starts work as a general dogsbody in the heart clinic, and makes herself indispensible. But as she and the son of a social climber fall in love, things get rocky.
Down-to-earth doctor Declan falls madly for nurse Fiona the first time he sees her. Ah, but Fiona has a past...
Binchy has only got better since the days when she started her writing life as an affectionately gossipy journalist and then wrote the first girly bestsellers - can it be 26 years since Light a Penny Candle?
A lovely book.

The Hat Shop on the Corner by Marita Conlon McKenna

The Hat Shop on the Corner

Marita Conlon-McKenna
Bantam Press price??


HATS have a special place in a woman's heart. There's something about a hat
that represents the celebration of life; they call up the happy times. You
have to live up to a hat by being happy in it.

The Hat Shop on the Corner is by the author of The Magdalen, and a series
of children‚s novels on the Famine, filmed as Under the Hawthorn Tree.But
here she‚s using a more gentle touch.

Ellie Matthews is cleaning up her late mother's hat shop on South Anne
Street in Dublin when two people come in and change her life.

One had ordered a hat from Ellie's mother, and expects to find it ready for
her daughter's wedding in a few days. .

The other is the solicitor with whom Ellie‚s mother had been negotiating -
to sell the shop to the developer who's hoping to build a multi-storey
emporium.

It‚s a development that could spell the end for the lovely street of
intimate shops where generations of Dubliners have bought treats for
themselves and the people they love.

As Ellie‚s aunt Yvette says, "Naturellement the gallerias and the large
department stores bring thousands of people to shop every day, but just
look at Paris - we have the best shopping in the world, huge stores, but
many of our finest shops are small, exquisite and individual."

Somehow, Ellie ˆ who was trained as a milliner by her French mother, but is
now a textile buyer for a big Dublin company - is drawn back into running
the shop.

This is a charming story of Ellie and her customers, who run the gamut from
ladies who lunch to the highly unlikely.

Dublin's new mayor Mo Brady, a battling northsider, walks in looking for a
serious hat for her newly glamorous life - and weighs in to make sure Anne
Street‚s shops stay in business.

Tough tyke Tommy Butler wants a Memory Hat for his nan's 100th birthday,
commemorating her century of Dublin life.

The neighbourhood revives as shopkeepers and their friends help each other
to repaint and rebuild, and offer each other ideas ˆ and have lots of great
parties.

And amid the millinery Ellie finds love: unreliable but gorgeous Rory, the
roadie for a series of bands, and Neil Harrington, the serious young
solicitor.

This joyous book is delightful - a perfect gift, and a story to treasure.

Hard to Choos by Pixie Pirelli

Hard to Choos
Pixie Pirelli
(New Island €??)

Synopsis: Charlotte hates Paris, so when she wins a trip for two to the fabled capital of romance, she hands it off to her two best girl pals, and goes instead with her two best boy pals to a classy country house hotel. Cue confusion, madness – and lurve.

FLIRTY, funny and sexy, Hard to Choos is the perfect book to pack in your beach bag this summer.

Pixie Pirelli – new author, hmm? Well, Kate Thompson fans may remember that her last book, Sex, Lies and Fairytales, included a character by that name, author of a bestseller called – yes – Hard to Choos.

Thompson is having some fun here, writing in the persona of English Pixie (real name, confusingly, Jane Gray).

But enough about the author – what about her protagonist?

Charlotte Cholewcyk (pronounced Ho-lev-chick) is a disaster on teetering heels. Sweet and funny, she’s a magnet for all life’s straying pratfalls.

It’s not helped by her habit of talking too fast when she needs to explain her way out of trouble.

Imagine Charlotte, dressed all in the sultry Coco de Mer underwear she’s helped friend Alex buy for his actress girlfriend – now his ex-girlfriend, thanks to one of Charlotte’s misunderstandings. And now the ex is demanding her birthday Coco-threads back.

Imagine Charlotte swimming in bra and pants across the country home hotel’s lake – only to be confronted by the sight of the aristocratic goats munching her floaty white dress and flowery hat back on shore.

Imagine her trying to reclaim her threads from the same goats, then leaping into the lake when she proves strangely attractive to the devil-eyed caprines.

Imagine her, too tender-hearted to eat a turbot when its dead, flat eye is staring her in the face, trying to convince her hostess that she has a terrible allergy to the cat that’s purring its way into the handbag where she’s concealed her fish dinner.

Imagine her in borrowed bling light-up shoes, flash-flashing her way across the drawing room of the hotel where all the guests are dressed in the best of all possible taste.

And amid the chaos, imagine dishy Alex – closer than a brother, Charlotte’s buddy since childhood and the kid who accompanied her through every scraped knee – suddenly transmuting into Mr Right.

Even Paris changes its tune, until by the end, tootsies tucked into the perfect Choos, hand-in-hand with the man of her dreams, Charlotte finds true happiness in the city of love. Very satisfying.