Elizabeth Smither brings wit, warmth and wisdom to this absorbing and beautifully written inter-generational story.' Peter SimpsonSylvie rows across a lake to her wedding.Madeleine flees to Paris and works in Le Livre Bleu bookshop.Isobel is summoned to her doctor's surgery late one afternoon.Elizabeth Smither takes us into the richly imagined worlds of three women - Sylvie, her mother Madeleine and grandmother Isobel. The narrative shifts between the three women in three different cities: Auckland, Paris and Melbourne. Elizabeth tells their stories with warm, deeply observant humour, through their love affairs, rivalries, marriages and all the beautiful minutiae of everyday life. She draws the threads together subtly and surprisingly to achieve a perfectly resolved ending.Described as having 'a gift for wry comedy combined with an eye for pinpoint detail', Elizabeth is one of New Zealand's finest writers.

On the day Lola Dearborn vowed�to never attend another funeral, she was deliberately present at three . . . � Lola Dearborn marries into Dearborn & Zander, a family of funeral directors, when she falls for Sam Dearborn at a dance. But when Sam, and her friend Alice Zander, injured in a freak accident, die, Lola devotes the rest of her life to exploration. She takes up residence in an art-deco hotel, she befriends the members of the Sylvester Quartet after gate-crashing a rehearsal. She reflects on the different kinds of love offered by men: Luigi the Italian undertaker who buries a dog with its owner, and Charles the retired surgeon with his disruptive daughter, Brandy. � Lola's themes underpin an exploration of love and death (including pet cemeteries), music and friendship. Set between Australia and New Zealand, it is a story both acute and amusing, knowledgeable and questing - much like Lola herself.