The Real Katie Lavender - Tapa blanda

Katie Lavender has always thought she was pretty unshockable, until a year after her mother's death she receives a letter from a solicitor telling her that the man she thought was her father, in fact wasn't. Her real father, a man named Stirling Nightingale, has for years been building a trust fund for her. And now she's of an age to collect it.

But Katie's not interested in the money. She wants to know about the man instead. So decides to do some snooping. She tracks him down to a beautiful riverside home in Surrey on the night he's hosting a birthday party for his ninety-year-old mother. And as she's hovering outside, Katie is mistaken for a replacement waitress - an opportunity just too good to miss. And so Katie discovers that the Nightingales are far from your normal family...But what makes a normal family anyway?

With an insatiable appetite for other people's business, Erica James will readily strike up conversation with strangers in the hope of unearthing a useful gem for her writing. She finds it the best way to write authentic characters for her novels, although her two grown-up sons claim they will never recover from a childhood spent in a perpetual state of embarrassment at their mother's compulsion.

The author of many bestselling novels, including GARDENS OF DELIGHT, which won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award, and her recent Sunday Times top ten bestsellers, SUMMER AT THE LAKE and THE DANDELION YEARS, Erica now divides her time between Suffolk and Lake Como in Italy, where she strikes up conversation with unsuspecting Italians.

Visit her website www.ericajames.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @theericajames