Ambition's Woman (PB) (2014)

At thirty-three, Lady Andrea Harrington is the most glamorous and powerful figure in the American food establishment, star of an award-winning gourmet television show and owner of the catering firm most in demand among the very chic and very rich. Then suddenly, at the height of her career, a miscalculation threatens to destroy everything. And once again she must fight to protect the position her ambition has driven her to reach. Getting there once has guaranteed her nothing. Born Andrea Nilsson in Cleveland, she is the only daughter of doting, middle-class parents who, in giving her all they could, simply taught her how much more there was. She becomes a Broadway star at twenty, and a has-been at twenty-two. She is offered a real-life role wife to an English baronet nearly twice her age, only to become the heroine of a real-life tragedy. Moving from brilliant Broadway openings to backstage despair, from English garden parties to lavish Los Angeles mansions, from the kitchens of the world's greatest restaurants to the bedrooms of the very rich, we follow Lady Andrea on her climb to the top. A gripping saga about a woman force to choose between love and career set in the heady world of international cuisine.