Reviewed by pagesbycyndy on
Reading updates
- Started reading
- Finished reading
- 19 February, 2018: Reviewed
Pieces of Happiness
by Anne Ostby
'If you loved The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, then Pieces of Happiness should be on your reading list. Five friends in their 60s, all battered by life, seek refuge on Fiji and start a chocolate farm.' - Good Housekeeping
Four friends leave their old lives behind. Will they learn to accept, forgive and find a better way to live?
When recently-widowed Kat writes to her four old school friends, inviting them to live with her on a cocoa plantation in the South Pacific, they swap icy pavements and TV dinners for a tropical breeze and an azure-blue ocean. Leaving behind loneliness, dead-end jobs and marriages that have gone sour, they settle into the Women's House, surrounded by palms and cocoa trees; and locals with the puzzling habit of exploding into laughter for no discernible reason.
Each of the women has her issues to resolve, and secrets to keep. But together the friends find a new purpose, starting a business making chocolate: bittersweet, succulent pieces of happiness. As they embrace a new culture that views ageing so differently from their own, will they learn to accept and forgive: to discover the value of friendship, and a better way to live?