'Dazzling ... The combination of lightness warmth and remarkable incisiveness creates a novel that is life-affirming and compulsively readable' Sunday Times It is 1964: Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited and notices a heart stoppingly beautiful woman. When he kisses Beverly Keating his host's wife he sets in motion the joining of two families whose shared fate will be defined on a day seven years later. In 1988 Franny Keating now twenty-four is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago. When she meets the famous author Leon Posen one night at the bar and tells him about her family she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story...