A Great Marriage

When a perfect wedding is called off just days before the big event, it sends two people--and their families--reeling, in this poignant novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Under the Tuscan Sun and Women in Sunlight

＂A moving immersion in love and loss.＂--People

A great marriage is an elusive thing, and only a few know the secret to making one.

Dara Willcox, in New York for a weekend, meets Austin Clarke at an art gallery. If love at first sight can happen, it happens to them. These two vivid, ambitious people are on different courses--he’s British, working temporarily in New York. She’s from North Carolina, set on law school. They don’t care. They will make their lives together happen. At their April engagement dinner at Dara’s family home, her mother, Lee, sets a beautiful table, and the family and close friends gather to celebrate. Rich, Dara’s father, raises a toast. Suddenly, Lee spills the wine, a brilliant red stain splashing onto the tablecloth and onto Austin.

Days later, Austin hears unsettling news from London that wrecks their plans. Dara abruptly cancels the wedding. She refuses to reveal the reason, not even to her best friends or her parents or grandmother, disrupting their family tradition of openness. As everyone knows, Lee and Rich have a great marriage, and Charlotte, her grandmother, had a colossal one, to the late Senator Mann. Charlotte literally wrote the book on the subject: She’s the author of international bestsellers on what makes a good or possibly a great marriage.

While Dara escapes to California and Indigo Island, South Carolina, Austin, back in London, faces a major tragedy, the consequences of which are life-altering. But it’s Lee, Dara’s mother, whose impulsive visit to London alters their fate.

With her signature warmth, humor, and incisive style, beloved author Frances Mayes creates a multigenerational probe into the complexity of love and the great mystery ride of marriage. A novel of casual choices and fateful consequences, A Great Marriage introduces two unforgettable families and the arrival of a stranger who rearranges their futures.

Frances Mayes is the author of the modern classic Under the Tuscan Sun, which was a New York Times bestseller for more than two and a half years and inspired the beloved motion picture starring Diane Lane. It was followed by Bella Tuscany, Every Day in Tuscany, and two illustrated books, In Tuscany and Bringing Tuscany Home. She is also the author of A Year in the World, See You in the Piazza, Always Italy, and A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home. Her novels include Swan and Women in Sunlight. Her books have been translated into more than fifty languages.