Sheer Abandon

By: Penny Vincenzi

Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor

A number-one bestseller from one of Britain’s most popular novelists, Sheer Abandon is an all-consuming story revolving around the consequences of a desperate act . . .

Martha, Clio, and Jocasta meet by chance at Heathrow airport in 1985 as they are starting off on separate backpacking adventures, and they decide to spend the first few days of their trips together in Thailand. When they go their separate ways, they vow to get together in London the following year. But many years pass before the three cross paths again, and the once-capricious, carefree girls now all have thriving careers. One of them, however, harbors a terrible secret: On her return from her pre-college excursion, she abandoned her just-born daughter at Heathrow.

Clio has fulfilled her ambition of becoming a doctor, only to find herself trapped in a marriage to an arrogant surgeon who belittles her and her professional achievements. Martha is a highly paid corporate lawyer, just embarking on a political career. Dedicated to her job, she has had little time for personal relationships and lives a busy, but lonely life. Jocasta, a tabloid newspaper reporter with an infallible instinct for the big story, is in love with a charming colleague who can’t make the permanent commitment she longs for. The infant abandoned at Heathrow has grown up under the loving care of her adoptive family. Now a beautiful teenager named Kate, she sets out to find her birth mother—a quest that unexpectedly brings the women together and exposes the secret buried so many years before.

Impossible to put down, Sheer Abandon is top-notch women’s fiction.©2007 Penny Vincenzi; (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

“It’s time Americans caught Vincenzi fever, because it’s almost a crime she’s not better known here . . . Everything is outsized in Vincenzi’s fiction: sex, money, personality, emotions, plot. And yet she gets all the details—about human behavior and women’s conflicted lives—just right. It’s perfect escapism.”
—USA Today

“She’s the plot-twist queen.”
—Adriana Trigiani, author of the Big Stone Gap trilogy and The Queen of the Big Time

“Vincenzi pulls out all the stops in this orchestral saga. . . . The mystery of who [Baby Bianca’s] mother is serves as the spine of this fat, satisfying novel . . . The various narrative themes crescendo through several all-hands-on-deck scenes . . . the women are, without exception, multifaceted, smart and brave, and their happiness is hard won. A U.K. bestseller, the book offers major escape and abandon for summer.”
–Publishers Weekly starred review

Be Prepared

I listened to Rosilyn Landor's reading of An Absolute Scandal (unabridged) and enjoyed it so much I broke my rule not to get abridged book versions with Sheer Abandon only because she was reading it. I should have stuck to my rule even tho the reading was just as good the content suffered so much from the abridgement the book seemed all chopped up. Get the unabridged version, but be prepared. If you have heard An Absolute Scandal, you will recognise much of it in Sheer Abandon.