Paradise Walk

Book excerpt: Jen Templeton Jay is a wealthy New England socialite when she leaves home to become a writer. To help her screenwriting career, she moved to California and made the acquaintance of charming film director Dem Dmitri. Dem is married, however, and their affair does not materialize ...until they met again at a museum in London, where Jen is researching a Georgian romance novel. Free from his wife's proximity, Dem starts an affair with Jen. Meanwhile, Jen has begun to write. Her novel will be historical romance, and it will feature British socialite Elizabeth Ollernshaw Cullen, who just happens to fall in love with a penniless actor named Jack Kincaid. Back in real life, Dem leaves Jen brokenhearted. Unable to hide from the truth in her fiction, Jen tries to kill herself and wakes up in a London clinic. On the road to recovery, she seems to be doing well-except she hears things, like the sound of rustling leaves, when no leaves are rustling. Meanwhile her novel continues to grow, set in the current location of the London clinic-once known as the Marylebone Pleasure Gardens, where ladies promenaded in skirts that sounded oddly of rustling leaves. Perhaps Jen's failed love story can be healed through the love of her characters-or perhaps not.