Soft Touch - Hardcover

Haran, Maeve

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316646830 ISBN 13: 9780316646833

Publisher: Little, Brown, 1999

Synopsis

Like all her nice liberal friends Catherine Hope is determined to bring up her children with Tolerance, Understanding and without Fear. It seems to be working: Catherine's teenage daughter, Rachel, looks all set to get 'A's in everything.Suddenly Rachel wants to spend every weekend at her grandmother's country cottage, a place she had previously done everything she could to avoid. The reason? Marko: sultry, sexy countryside campaigner, out to save a threatened woodland from destruction, a woodland on the doorstep of Catherine's conventional and disapproving mother-in-law, Lavinia, who already reckons Catherine is a soft touch. What will Lavinia say apart from 'I told you so' about Rachel becoming a teenage road rebel?While Catherine's precious liberalism goes out of the window and she yearns to lock her daughter in her bedroom, Lavinia turns out to have hidden passions of her own. As the protest erupts around them, friendships are severed, loyalties divided and lives endangered. The dutiful daughter, model mother and gracious grandmother all find themselves changed for ever in this entertaining and moving story of the war between the generations.

About this title

Review

Bestselling author of Having It All and All That She Wants, Maeve Haran has scored another triumph with Soft Touch, a light-hearted look at the melodrama of family relationships in the 1990s. Catherine Hope serves as the novel's focus as she finds herself helplessly trapped between generations. Scorned by her 18-year-old daughter who treats her "with the kind of contempt normally reserved for traffic wardens and paedophiles", Catherine finds no solace from her overbearing, conventional mother-in-law: "The trouble with your generation is that you have the authority of a damp dishrag!" And things look set to go from bad to worse when her daughter becomes involved with a sexy road protestor--a road her mother-in-law is campaigning to have built! Tempers flare, lines are drawn and Catherine is ready to give up on the lot of them. But when it comes down to it, the whole family manages to surprise one another in the face of crisis. Soft Touch is an entertaining novel about growing up, growing old and growing together. --Shannon Bingham

Review

This entertaining parable of the generations glitters with familiar emotions, from the frustration of family rows to a mother's gratitude for rare flashes of tenderness. (GOOD HOUSEKEEPING)

Haran writes with infectious warmth and sympathy... she embarks on a fast-moving, enjoyable plot, part gritty realism, part romantic fantasy, in which everyone learns a useful lession, and all the ends are beautifully, amiably ties into bows. (SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY)

Haran's novel takes a wry look at the generation gap, providing a good many laughs along the way. (THE TIMES)

Bestselling author of Having It All and All That She Wants, Maeve Haran has scored another triumph with Soft Touch, a light-hearted look at the melodrama of family relationships in the 1990s. Catherine Hope serves as the novel's focus as she finds hersel (Shannon Bingham, AMAZON.CO.UK REVIEW)

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0316646830
• ISBN 13: 9780316646833
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288