Overview
Audra's story, begun in 1926 England, is one of struggle. After the great passion of her marriage is replaced by tragedy, she vows to give her precious daughter Christina the world. Repaying the benefits of her mother's iron-willed promise, Christina rises to the top of the fashion industry as the head of her own business empire in New York. But in the most fateful decision of her life, she sacrifices her real dream in the name of love. With her daughter Kyle, the story comes full circle. Will her mother's dream be Kyle's own? Or will she tear the family apart with a single, momentous decision of her own?As powerful and personal a tale as any Barbara Taylor Bradford has ever written, this is a wonderfully involving and sweeping novel of three remarkable women, each committing an act of will that will define their lives forever.
Synopsis
From beloved bestselling author Barbara Taylor Bradford comes the enthralling saga of three generations of extraordinary women—of the fate that befalls them, and the choices that define their lives…
IN THE NAME OF LOVE.
Orphaned after the death of her mother, well-bred Audra Kenton rose from selfless nurse to servant of an affluent suffragette, to a fiercely independent bride whose passionate marriage was overtaken by an unforeseeable tragedy. Now Audra has but one dream—to bestow upon her brilliantly artistic daughter, every opportunity that she was denied…
AT THE HEART OF AMBITION.
Given the world, the stubborn Christina has forsaken the wishes of her noble mother to forge the career of her choice—that of a glittering Manhattan fashion empire she hopes to bequeath to her own daughter. But in young and beautiful Kyle stirs a spirit that is inherently headstrong, equally independent, and just as ironically resistant to the sacrifices made in the name of love.
FOR THE SAKE OF A DREAM.
From the picturesque Yorkshire Dales to the haute couture luxuries of Paris and London to the bittersweet respite of home and family, three women face stunning betrayals and astonishing reversals of fate as each brings her own intimate struggle to their need of personal success and to a triumphant and heartening understanding of devotion, duty, and destiny.
“This novel continues the Bradford tradition of spirited romances peopled with memorable, self made women…fetching.”—Booklist
Andrew Postman
Throughout 'Act of Will', major characters are ignored for chapters at a time and events occur with almost breathtaking predictability. That may be its secret. Barbara Taylor Bradford, whose fans number somewhere in the octillions, manages uncannily to do precisely what good storytelling does not - to make a ''sweeping'' saga parochial and to prevent her characters from achieving lives of their own. -- New York Times