The Marriage Bed Book

It is high summer in Paradise. Laura Fenton takes toast, post, and the new Country Life out to the garden. Her spaniels stalk the white doves as the smell of newly mown grass mingles with the scent of old blush roses on the brick wall. She feeds the black swans and watches her husband tidying up the lawn. Thirty years of marriage with no electric shocks, a solid, stolid marriage based on the pragmatic ebbs and flows of middle age. Dependable Geoffrey: He loves his wife, sometimes painfully so, and Laura does love him in her own way. In return, he has given her everything she could possibly want: the mossy Elizabethan farmhouse that has been in his family for generations, the garden that is her greatest passion, the children whose children will inherit both. Laura's life seems idyllic - she has all that money can buy and a husband who indulges her every whim. But Laura is soon to realize just how much she has taken for granted when all that is important to her becomes threatened, and she and Geoffrey are forced to reassess each other and, ultimately, their marriage.

Warm, witty, and perceptive, this debut novel by a renowned gardening writer tells a charming story in the grand tradition of Rosamunde Pilcher. Laura's life seems idyllic. She has all that money can buy and a husband who indulges her every whim. But Laura is soon to realize just how much she has taken for granted when all that is important to her becomes threatened.