‘I know of few contemporary writers whose novels are more eagerly awaited than those of Joanna Trollope. Her loyal readers, mostly women in my experience, will pick up a new Trollope and reserve its delights for holiday reading ...'-- Emma Soames, The Oldie

Lizzie and Frances were twins. They looked alike - tall, fair,unmistakably English - but there the resemblance ended.After all, Lizzie was the one who had got it right - a husband, four children, a profitable small business. Frances,by contrast, was still footloose in her thirties, and had none of those proper and desirable things.

Lizzie worried about Frances. She worried that Frances didn't have a husband and children; she worried about the fragility of the funny little travel company Frances had started. Then, out of the blue, Frances refused, for the first time in her life, to come home to Lizzie for Christmas. She said she was going away, on business. She said she was going to Spain. Lizzie's worrying turned almost to panic. To Spain？ At Christmas？ From their earliest childhood, Frances had always kept something back from Lizzie, a small private bit of herself, which had always made Lizzie watchful - but this threatened to become something quite different.

Joanna Trollope's latest triumph combines an intoxicating love story which unfolds in enthralling Spanish landscapes with a sobering close-up of Britain's current economic stranglehold on a family who never dreamt that money would be a problem. It is a richly intriguing study of twins,of possessiveness and guilt, motherhood, marriage, and late flowering with a vengeance.

Joanna Trollope is the author of a number of historical novels and Britannia's Daughters, a study of women in the British Empire. A Spanish Lover is her sixth contemporary novel, following The Choir, A Village Affair, A Passionate Man, The Rector's Wife and The Men and The Girls. She was born and lives in Gloucestershire.