Product Description

Champagne D`Vyne is a celebrity socialite with a charmed life and a mania for men, money and fame. Jane is a twenty-something journalist with an ordinary life - man stress, work stress and a spare tyre that won’t go away. As their contrasting worlds become bizarrely intertwined, Jane realises that the blonde, busty and blatantly ambitious Champagne will let nothing come between her and what she wants. Least of all Jane.

Meanwhile, in a crumbling country manor in the West Country, everything’s falling apart for Jane’s best friend Tally. The family seat is collapsing - money’s too tight to mansion - her brother the heir has gone AWOL and her mother’s a New Age hippy with a Red Indian boyfriend called Big Horn. Tally desperately needs a rich and handsome husband to save her beloved ancestral home.

Then Jane gets a brilliant new job. A knight on a gold chargecard turns up for Tally. Life finally looks blissful for both of them. But Champagne D`Vyne has other ideas...

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #532714 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Twentysomething, magazine journalist Jane has enough stress--breaking up with her boyfriend, falling in love with a man who leaves the country the next morning and the spare tyre around her waist--without the added headache of the glamorous socialite Champagne D'Vyne, who pops effervescently into her life and proceeds to sour everything as their lives become inextricably intertwined.

Meanwhile, her best friend Tally's crumbling ancestral mansion in Lower Bulge is about to be sold off unless Jane can find a rich knight to come to Tally's rescue and, while she's at it, nab one for herself. The reader is launched into the world of double-barrelled socialites like the Front-Bottomes and Uppe-Timmselves, and the offices of the "Gorgeous" and "Fabulous" magazine worlds where only girls with slim calves and tinted bikini lines get onto the front covers.

Simply Divine sparkles with Wendy Holden's sharp, acerbic wit as she bursts the bubble of high society's extravagant pretensions and leaves the reader choking at some of her more shocking sentiments:

"How could [Tally] see that far? ... This honing of the optics came, Jane imagined, courtesy of the genetic inheritance of generations of Venerys scanning the horizons of their vast acreage. Being grand, however, had its downsides too. Like the girls at Fabulous, Tally had always suffered the most agonising of periods. Blue blood was evidently more painful."

Wendy Holden holds nothing back in her outrageous satire on the rich and frivolous, from psychics to New Age ceremonies to modern, "glossy" bibles, she exposes the shallowness behind the façade --Nicola Perry

The Mirror
'Well observed and witty'

Esquire
'Wickedly witty'

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Customer Reviews

Less than divine...
I was disappointed with this book. From the reviews, I expected a humorous, frolicking story. Instead, the book is predictable and, at best, mildly amusing. The character names are beyond belief. This is an OK book for times when you're stuck on a train or airplane. The Bridget Jones books are much better written and funnier.

Title says it all!
A delightful chic flic! I'm not much a a reader because I don't get the time but this book was rarely closed! Filled with light wit and humour and some fantastic characters. The way Holden portrays the character Champagne is brilliant - I think everyone knows someone just like her! The ending has a real twist that I was never expecting. Holden certainly kept me smiling with this divine book! Definatly my fave story yet from Wendy!

I read this book for a little light relief and laughed a lot
Ok, so having read some of the other reviews on this page, it is not the most original book in it's puns, but who cares? Read it in the spirit in which it's meant - light relief and you'll probably enjoy it. I finished reading the book last night after choosing it for a little light relief and fun after reading the psychology books I've read of late and it was great. I even read bits aloud to my father and he laughed too. I will certainly be reading more of Wendy Holden's novels as I like her style of writing and her humour tickles me most of the time. Some of the stereotypes were a little obvious and some bits of the plot could have been deepened and developed, but I am not expecting it to be a great classic (and I am sure that some of the classics could be improved on in some ways too!)Well done Wendy, keep on writing and I'll keep on reading!