Chloe's Song

The new tale of love and life, rich with humour and pathos, from our best loved storyteller. From the prison cell where Chloe Smith, 43, is awaiting trial for the merciful murder of the only man who ever loved her with honesty, she recalls the men in her life who lied to her. She remembers her adored father, who drank too much; the loss of her virginity at Stonehenge to a schoolboy, her marriage to petty crook Zane Tomkins, the Isle of Wight ferryman who said he was a lonely deep sea sailor, the young priest who said he loved her but left to establish a church for men, or the lighthouse keeper who shouted in his sleep-all these men, and many others, have let Chloe down. Chloe`s Song is the story of one woman`s quest to get what every woman wants-a man who tells the truth.

Forty-two-year-old Chloe Smith is once more on her uppers when she answers an advertisement for housekeeper to a country couple, Sir Benedict and Lady Annabel Bowling. She little expects to end up, two years later, in the dock of Winchester Crown Court on a charge of murder.

It is a part of the country familiar to Chloe since first being brought to Sailsbury as a child by her raffish but musically talented father on his discharge from the army. And it was in Southampton that she first encountered the man who would become her husband: Zane Smith, an irresistibly attractive small-time crook who appears and disappears without warning.

Chloe's story, and those of all the characters who make up the colourful backdrop to her life, is told with Leslie Thomas's characteristic humour and warmth. The master storyteller has once more produced an unputdownable tale of love and life.