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The Very Picture of You
- Author: Isabel Wolff
- Category: Fiction Commercial Women’s / Romance
- Publisher: HarperCollins (UK), Random House (US)
- Pub date: 4 August 2011
- Length: 400 pages
About The Very Picture of You
a rather bittersweet love story is described in wonderful, vivid detail… Read this if you‘re in need of a serious feelgood factor
– DAILY MAIL on A VINTAGE AFFAIR
Thirty-three year old Ella Graham is a portrait painter; her luminous and quirky likenesses are beginning to gain her widespread recognition.
While attending a fund-raising party in Chelsea, Ella’s half-sister, Chloe, makes the winning bid in a silent auction for an Ella Graham portrait commission. She intends the portrait to be of her American fiancé, Nate, as a surprise engagement present for him. However, news of the commission and, even more so of the engagement, comes as a blow to Ella who has never liked Nate and doesn’t want to paint him. But in the magic space that is a portrait sitting Ella finds her feelings towards Nate softening. As they begin to learn
more about each other, she begins to realise to her horror that she is not simply warming to Nate, but is falling steadily in love with him. Worse still, he’s falling in love with her, whilst Chloe – completely unaware that the two people she cares most about are forming a traitorous bond – is blissfully preparing for her dream wedding.
To add to her dismal predicament, Ella’s natural father John, who left when she was four, turns up out of the blue from Australia. Still bitter from his abandonment, Ella is quick to rebuff him, as she always has done. But, as time passes and Ella’s father returns to Australia, her feelings towards him begin to shift. When she ends up painting a lady who unexpectedly once knew her father, she gains an important, and previously unknown, insight as to why he left. Anguished by her growing love for Nate, and her sudden desire to make amends with her father, Ella heads to Australia… But will the move cement her family together or simply tear her apart?
About the Author
Isabel Wolff is a bestselling author whose eight romantic comedy novels have been published in twenty nine languages, selling a million copies in France alone. Isabel’s debut novel, THE TRIALS OF TIFFANY TROTT (HarperCollins 1998) grew out of her popular Daily Telegraph novel of the same name and was swiftly followed by THE MAKING OF MINTY MALONE, OUT OF THE BLUE, RESCUING ROSE, BEHAVING BADLY, A QUESTION OF LOVE, FORGET ME NOT and A VINTAGE AFFAIR, which spent six months in the Amazon contemporary Fiction Top 100 and was an Amazon Book of the Year for 2009. Her latest novel, THE VERY PICTURE OF YOU will be published by HarperCollins in September 2011.
In her fiction Isabel expertly blends pathos with humour to create novels that, while being page-turning, commercial reads are also extremely well-written, engaging, poignant and uplifting. She has been shortlisted for the RNA Romantic Novel of the Year Award (2004) and for the American Libraries Association Reading List - Women’s Fiction (2011).
Before becoming a novelst Isabel was a successful broadcaster and journalist, writing for The Spectator, Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and the Independent on Sunday. She has presented radio programmes on BBC World Service and on Radio 4, and was a regular newspaper reviewer on BBC Breakfast news. Isabel lives in London with her family.