At the start of this year I posted about Maeve Binchy under the heading Warm and Fuzzy and said how much I enjoyed her books and loved reading them when I did not necessarily want a book which would test my somewhat lacking analytical skills and for which I need a pen and a notebook. I just wanted a book to simply read and enjoy. I think Maeve is a wonderfully easy fluid writer and, because of this apparent lack of difficulty in being read and understood, gets dismissed by reviewers. Another writer who falls into this category of a Good Read and, for that very reason, will never find her books in the Literary Review, is Penny Vincenzi. I first came across her as a columnist in Good Housekeeping and always used to read what she had to say each month as I found her witty and amusing. She has four grown up daughters and an incredibly supportive and understanding husband and, as you can see from this picture, is very very pretty (yes I know I should hate her but I don't). Just to make her almost impossibly perfect, she writes extremely unputdownable books full of terrific characters, wonderful situations, with romance and misery dolloped out in equal portions. I have read all her output and always look for each one as it is published with great eagerness.
As I have had and, indeed am still having, a pretty awful time at work at the moment, I found PV was just what I needed this weekend. I picked up two fat paperbacks of hers in a charity shop last week, one I had read ages ago and the other I had not read at all so I have spent the entire weekend curled up in bed/on sofa/in bath just reading them till my eyes have fallen out of my head (well, not quite just feels like it). Forbidden Places tells the story of three totally different women, Grace, Clarissa and Florence and their lives, loves and marriages during the Second World War. It is written at a terrific pace and opens with these three friends, now old ladies, meeting up, as they do each year, on midsummer day. Clarissa and Florence are 
aware that Grace has always hidden a secret from them and are determined to prise it out of her but she refuses saying she has promised never to tell and she never will. The book then slips back and you have to read right through to more or less the last page to find out what the secret was. I had made several guesses along the way, all of them wrong. Loved it.
Second one, Another Woman tells the story of sweet, lovely, charming delightful Cressida spoiled rotten by her parents who think she is quite quite perfect and who is getting married in the country on a beautiful summer's day. The household wakes up and she has vanished. What has happened to her and where has she gone? As the day unfolds we meet all the different characters in the drama and slowly find out that Cressida was not as sweet as she had seemed and underneath her smiling face lurks a somewhat nasty piece of work....
I first discovered Penny Vicenzi about ten years ago when she wrote a marvellous trilogy all about the Lytton Family set in the world of publishing which I simply adored. These books are fat, comforting 500+ page books and totally absorbing and addictive. I think she is an excellent writer but as with Maeve Binchy, Rosamund Pilcher and others writers of eminently popular 'blockbusters' noses are turned up by reviewers.
More fool they - they are missing a treat.
