Charlie's Daughter

Description for CHARLIE'S DAUGHTER by Susan Child:

The time is 1981. A beautiful woman is about to meet a handsome, distinguished older man in Boston's glamorous Ritz Carlton Hotel. She is Kate Finch, a student at Radcliffe. He is Charles Swann, a legendary, multimillionaire business tycoon. He is also Kate's father, and they are coming face to face for the first time.

Thus the stage is set for a magnificent novel that goes back through two decades of American life to trace the spinning out of a love affair that triumphs over time and class barriers. Charles Swann, dynamic and driven by ambition, is very successful yet starving for love until he meets Anne, the Irish girl who is his perfect mate in bed but who cannot join him on his social level. Their affair becomes the vivid center of both their lives until Anne becomes pregnant and Charles cannot bring himself to leave his proud yet fragile blue-blood wife. Anne is intent on keeping her baby and eventually enters into a marriage with a passionate idealist who offers her a far different kind of love and treats her daughter Kate, as if she were his own. Kate learns who her true father is only as her mother lies dying, and it is she who must pass final judgment on the stolen love that brought her into being, as she decides whether to accept or reject the larger-than-life figure who seems to have everything yet demands that she fill the great, empty place in his life.

Effortlessly moving from the Kennedy-like private estates and dazzling social whirl of the very rich to the pungent, irrepressible vitality of the Boston Irish, this is an elegant, sophisticated, and sensuous novel written with a keen eye for people and places.