Product Description

In the heart of County Kildare is Davenport Hall - a crumbling eighteenth-century mansion house, ancestral home to Portia Davenport, her beautiful younger sister Daisy and their dotty, eccentric mother, Lucasta. Disaster strikes when their father abandons the family, cleaning them out of the little cash they had managed to hold on to. But a ray of hope appears when Steve Sullivan, an old family friend and confirmed bachelor, suggests that they allow the hall to be used as the location for a major new movie. So Davenport Hall is taken over by the creme de la creme, including the self-centred Montana Jones, fresh out of rehab and anxious to kick-start her career, and Guy van der Post, a major sex symbol with an eye for Daisy. Throw in Ella Hepburn, Hollywood royalty and living legend, and soon there's more sex and drama off-camera than on! And Portia, who'd completely given up on love, is in for quite a surprise...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #360782 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

About the Author
CLAUDIA CARROLL is a young Irish actress in her early thirties with many credits to her name. She currently stars in Ireland's top soap, FAIR CITY, as Nicola Prendergast, one of the most popular characters. She lives in Dublin.

Customer Reviews

He loves me not...he loves me
I brought this book on holiday with me and I could not leave it down. It has to be one of the funniest books I have ever read. It is hilarious. Seeing Claudia Carroll regularly in Fair City I can hear her saying a lot of the dialogue in the book. It really was great. I adored the bit about her mother having bad vibes when she herself was getting married. The description was brilliant. A really, really enjoyable book. I loved every bit of it.

Something different
I'm not usually a great fan of the 'chick-lit' genre but Carroll's debut novel is really something different. Witty, entertaining and unputdownable, we follow the adventures of the Davenport family as they struggle to live in their crumbling ancestoral mansion. Irish humour permeates through this unmissable read and we grow to love, not only the heroine of the novel, but the entire cast of charactors Carroll has created. Her ability to write comic parts could rival that of the writers of 'Father Ted.'

The story centres around two sisters, Portia and Daisy, who have grown up with an aristocratic title but not a penny to their name. In order to make enough money to save the family home from ruin they are forced to market their house as a movie set... Whilst at the same time preventing their dotty mother from exacting revenge on their gambling runaway father...

Not to be missed.

Great
This debut novel by the Irish actress is set in County Kildare and the crumbling mansion house Davenport Hall. When Daisy and Portia Davenports father abandons them and their mother (my favourite character - the crazy eccentric Lucasta), a family friend suggests that they turn the ancestral home over to be used as the location for a major new movie to earn them enough money to make the necessary repairs to the house. As the Hall is taken over, we meet film stars Montana Jones, Ella Hepburn and Guy van der Post, and before you can say "Lights, Camera, Action" theres more sex and drama off screen than on... A great read, buy this, and then buy the second book which also features Portia and Davenport Hall "The Last of the Great Romantics".