A French Pirouette
Au revoir old life, Bonjour Brittany!Parisian prima ballerina Suzette knows it’s time to hang up her pointe shoes before her next injury ruins her ankles for good. But dancing is all she’s ever known and she’s terrified of who she’ll be after that final curtain falls.Meanwhile, lonely Londoner Libby is pouring her life savings into buying an auberge that she and her late husband had loved visiting on holiday. It’s a huge risk that could leave her broke…as well as broken-hearted.And then there’s Brigitte who’s retired to the village for a slower pace of life, but who dreads seeing someone else run her beloved auberge.Three fresh starts…one unforgettable summer!
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Au revoir old life, Bonjour Brittany!
Parisian prima ballerina Suzette knows it’s time to hang up her pointe shoes before her next injury ruins her ankles for good. But dancing is all she’s ever known and she’s terrified of who she’ll be after that final curtain falls.
Meanwhile, lonely Londoner Libby is pouring her life savings into buying an auberge that she and her late husband had loved visiting on holiday. It’s a huge risk that could leave her broke…as well as broken-hearted.
And then there’s Odette who’s retired to the village for a slower pace of life, but who dreads seeing someone else run her beloved auberge.
Three fresh starts…one unforgettable summer!
A French Pirouette
Jennifer Bohnet
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2015
Copyright © Jennifer Bohnet 2015
Jennifer Bohnet 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.
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.
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-book Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9781474028288
Version date: 2018-07-23
Contents
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Recipes
About the Publisher
JENNIFER BOHNET
is a West Country girl now living in the wilds of rural Brittany, France. She’s still not sure how she ended up there! The saying ‘Life is what happens while you’re deciding what to do’ is certainly true in her case. She’s always written alongside having various jobs: playgroup leader, bookseller, landlady, restaurateur, farmer’s wife, secretary/p,a. – the list is endless, but does provide a rich vein of inspiration for her stories.
For three years she wrote a newspaper column in The South Hams Group of Newspapers (Devon) where she took a wry look at family life. Since living in France, it is her fiction that has taken off – with hundreds of short stories and several serials published internationally.
Allergic to housework and gardening, she rarely does either but she does like cooking and entertaining and wandering around vide greniers (the French equivalent of flea markets) looking for a bargain or two. Her children currently live in fear of her turning into an ageing hippy and moving to Totnes.
To find out more about Jennifer visit her website:
or chat to her on Twitter: @jenniewriter
For my mum who loved dancing and instilled a love of ballet in me.
(Evelyn Page 1918 - 2008)
Suzette
Suzette Shelby, the world-famous French ballerina, was soaking her feet in the bathroom of her Paris apartment. Something she did routinely even when she was ‘resting’. Ruefully she lifted her feet out of the water and studied them.
Misshapen old lady’s feet with bunions and callouses stuck on the end of her thirty-eight-year-old legs. Legs that were still shapely with the taut muscled calves and thighs of a dancer. Picking up the soft-as-down large white towel she’d hung over the heated rail, she carefully wrapped her feet in it and gently began to pat them dry. The warmth cocooned her feet. Bliss.
The ballet company’s official chiropodist was always stressing about her feet these days but aside from emergencies she refused to let anybody touch them. Removal of the callouses would only give her blisters. The bunions she’d deal with later when she retired.
Retired. A scary word that had entered her vocabulary in recent months and was threatening to take over her life. It would have to happen soon she knew but what was she to do afterwards? She was lucky to have lasted at the top for so long. Many dancers were finished by their early thirties. Usually by then the injuries had mounted up and the RICE—rest, ice, compression, elevation—recovery times were lengthening.
