Thea, the heroine of Katie Fforde's Artistic Licence, is a disorganised 35-year-old whose life is going nowhere. Or that is how it appears to her student lodgers--whom she unwittingly mothers--and to her older friend Molly, a lady of leisure with a missed vocation as a chief executive. When Thea jets off to Ireland on a whim to stay with the devastatingly good-looking artist Rory, all her friends from her new hometown of Cheltenham are appalled. Equally, when Thea, on seeing Rory's heart-wrenchingly beautiful landscape paintings, decides to set up an art gallery in provincial west of England, her friends cannot believe what they are hearing.

Katie Fforde makes clear that Thea knows what she's doing, and that her chaotic and messy lifestyle is her own conscious choice. Her determined resistance to the persistent Irish charmer Rory--he's too young, she doesn't have casual affairs--and the apparent ambivalence of Ben, a divorced and know-it-all artistic director of an ad agency, sets up a plot where the embryonic art gallery and Thea's accompanying search for a more satisfying life form centre stage, making any love interest incidental. Olivia Dickinson