Matters of the Heart

Hope Dunne is a top photographer who has known marriage, motherhood and loss, and who has made a quiet, contented life for herself in a SoHo loft. She is not looking for romance when she takes a last-minute assignment to fly to London at Christmas and photograph Finn O'Neill, an Irish-American author famous for novels of literary darkness.

In person Finn is warm, boyish and enormously successful, and he is taken with Hope immediately. He courts her as no one ever has, whisking her away to his palatial, isolated estate in Ireland. Then the cracks appear: gaps in his history, small lies, sudden jealousy.

Danielle Steel's novel is a portrait of coercive control and emotional abuse, in which a capable woman thousands of miles from home has to work out how much of the man she loves is real, and how to get free of him.