The Engagements

Paperback

Condition: Good

From the New York Times best-selling author of Commencement and Maine comes a gorgeous sprawling novel about marriage - about those who marry in a white heat of passion those who marry for partnership and comfort and those who live together love each other and have absolutely no intention of ruining it all with a wedding. Evelyn has been married to her husband for 40 years - 40 years since he slipped off her first wedding ring and put his own in its place. Delphine has seen both sides of love - the ecstatic glorious highs of seduction and the bitter spiteful fury that descends when it's over. James a paramedic who works the night shift knows his wife's family thinks she could have done better; while Kate partnered with Dan for a decade has seen every kind of wedding - beach weddings backyard weddings castle weddings - and has vowed never ever to have one of her own. As these lives and marriages unfold in surprising ways we meet Frances Gerety a young advertising copywriter in 1947. Frances is working on the De Beers campaign and she needs a signature line so one night before bed she scribbles a phrase on a scrap of paper: "A Diamond Is Forever". And that line changes everything. A rich layered exhilarating novel spanning nearly 100 years The Engagements captures four wholly unique marriages while tracing the story of diamonds in America and the way - for better or for worse - these glittering stones have come to symbolize our deepest hopes for everlasting love.