Gone with the Windsors Hardcover Laurie Graham - Hardcover

Laurie Graham

3.76

863 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007146752 ISBN 13: 9780007146758

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2005

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The scandalous divorc�e who led the besotted Prince of Wales to abdicate his throne first appears in the fictional diary of Maybell Brumby as her schoolmate Bessie, a charity girl with pretensions and good cheekbones. "I'm Wallis," she snarls, "and if you call me anything else you're going to be sorry."

One social climber swiftly recognizes another. When life's whimsical currents toss these two gilt-edged gold diggers together again as adults, history will change its course.

Maybell is the wealthy, friskily young widow of a Baltimore bore, eager to break into London society. Wallis has jettisoned husband number one and is looking for the escape hatch from husband number two; impoverished as ever, she's armed only with that terrific bone structure, a few erotic tricks she's picked up in the Far East, and the determination to land the most eligible bachelor in the world. And now, to help her on her quest, she has her old chum Maybell, along with her inexhaustible trust fund and her useful inability to recognize the deft touch of a born con artist.

Trailing a cloud of Worth perfume and an ermine stole, missing the point of every conversation, the deliciously dim Maybell witnesses the courtship of the twentieth century and the scandal that rocked a monarchy—recording all in her diary.

As light as a meringue, as fizzy as a freshly popped bottle of champagne, Gone with the Windsors is a supremely clever entertainment.

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About the Author:

Laurie Graham's nine novels include The Future Homemakers of America and Gone with the Windsors. She lives in Venice, Italy.

From Publishers Weekly:

The diary entries of shallow and oblivious Baltimore socialite Maybell Brumby comprise Graham's fourth novel, which explores the fictional lives of intimates involved in the 1936 abdication of King Edward VIII. Maybell, widowed by her older husband, leaves for London in 1932 to join her sister Violet and falls in with her school friend Bessie Wallis "Wally" Simpson, the married woman (twice, in fact) who has set her sights on the then Prince of Wales. Through Maybell's American patricianism, Graham (The Future Homemakers of America) skewers the tedious royal family and their aristocratic hangers-on. Maybell's self-absorption and dim-wittedness make her endearing at odd moments (as when she learns that her other sister, "Doopie," is deaf rather than mentally handicapped); her chatty tone is grating when the action—primarily Wally's plotting, conquest and royal assumption—slows. Graham depicts the abdication as a kind of bedroom farce and uses Maybell's ignorance to add ambiguity to the controversial relationship of the duke (as he is known after abdication) and Wally to the Nazi regime. As WWII becomes imminent, the leisured friends must make a run for it, and the partings are not all amicable. This light romp through sordid territory is sly, gossipy fun. (Aug.)
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