MY LAST DUCHESS BY DAISY GOODWIN (Headline £12.99)
Clever Daisy Goodwin as well. Not content with being a raven-haired TV poetry temptress, she’s written My Last Duchess. It’s a marvellously assured read about a marvellously assured American heiress called (appropriately) Cora Cash, one of those sexy buccaneers who took the impoverished British aristocracy by storm in the nineteenth century. It’s a literary Greatest Hits; there’s a mysterious duke, a woman in a veil and various secrets, as well as lashings of lovely period detail about dresses for yachting, opera and dinner. Heartily recommended; Goodwin writes beautifully; her easy style disguising both erudition and emotional truth.

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