Best of Friends
Love, life and friendship … No one captures it better than No. 1 bestseller Cathy Kelly.Good times or bad, friends are always there…They’re friends for life . . . and life is for living.In the picturesque harbor tour of Dunmore, four friends are facing hard times. Abby’s TV career is taking off, but her marriage to Tom is rocky. Meanwhile, her teenage daughter Jess despairs of ever finding a boyfriend. Lizzie has time for everyone – her family and friends, but never for herself. And Erin, married and back in Ireland after eight years in Chicago, is finding it hard to face up to her past.When tragedy strikes, it rocks the small town. Drawn together in their sadness, the four women suddenly realize what is important – life is for living and they must grab it with both hands.
Читать Best of Friends онлайн беплатно
Best of Friends
Cathy Kelly
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2003
Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Ebook Edition © February 2012 ISBN: 9780007389315
Version: 2017-11-21
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
‘A must for Kelly’s many fans; a warm, moving read.’
Daily Mail
‘Totally believable.’
Rosamunde Pilcher
‘An upbeat and diverting tale skilfully told…Kelly knows what her readers want and consistently delivers.’
Sunday Independent
‘An absorbing, heart-warming tale.’
Company
‘Her skill at dealing with the complexities of modern life, marriage and families is put to good effect as she teases out the secrets of her characters.’
Choice
‘Kelly dramatises her story with plenty of sparky humour.’
The Times
‘Kelly has an admirable capacity to make the readers identify, in turn, with each of her female characters…’
Irish Independent
For Tamsin
Table of Contents
Brush hair, brush teeth, forget about eyeliner, just go for mascara and a dust of bronzer. Squirt of deodorant…blast, none left. Put that on the shopping list. Where is the shopping list, anyway…?
Sally Richardson had a million and one things on her mind as she hastily buttoned up her shirt and pulled on a pair of black trousers over skin still damp from the shower.
Friday mornings in the Richardsons’ house were even more manic than usual because on Fridays and Saturdays, The Beauty Spot, the beauty salon that Sally owned and ran, opened at nine instead of half-past. That extra half-hour made a huge difference, Sally thought, every time Friday rolled round. She had to be out of the front door at eight forty-five on the nail to drop the boys at the day nursery instead of the rest of the week’s more leisurely nine fifteen.
There was no time to dawdle over toast and coffee – not that much dawdling ever went on at the Richardsons’, with two working parents.
Sally told her friends that she never had fantasies in which Jude Law ripped off all her clothes and told her she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in his life. No, her fantasies were about the household running to a strict timetable, where she was perkily out of bed and showered by half-past seven (with make-up on, hair perfect and no snags in her tights), ready to drag three-year-old Daniel from his bed (four-year-old Jack would already be up and beheading a few Action Men). Dressing the boys and getting breakfast ready would happen without too much cereal ending up on the floor and without small boys squabbling, and there might even be time for Sally to share a cup of coffee with Steve before he raced out of the door at eight twenty. Of course, this was the stuff of daydreams, as Sally often admitted to her mother-in-law, Delia. (She nearly told Delia about the Jude Law thing but then thought better of it. Delia was more of a Sean Connery woman, anyway.)
‘It can’t be good for the image of a beauty salon when the owner arrives out of breath, without a screed of make-up on her face and her shirt buttoned up all wrong,’ Sally had once pointed out.
