Lovers begins in the glowingly optimistic year of 1983 as Gigi Orsini, aching for adventure, begins her first day on the job as
a copywriter at the advertising agency of Frost/Rourke/Bernheim in Los Angeles. During the following year she will encounter enough professional challenges and passionate entanglements to keep even Gigi-that high-spirited, ingenious, red- headed enchantress who grew to woman- hood in Scruples Two-on a roller coaster ride that swoops from thrilling personal achievement to new levels of sexual tension and a web of unexpected romance.
Lovers is a distillation of purest Krantz, richly detailed, intricate in plot, and bursting with captivating characters, many of them new to her readers, others favorites from Scruples and Scruples Two. Together they form a group of a half-dozen couples engaged in an intoxicating, interwoven dance of love: love abruptly appearing with blazing potency, love incredulously lost, love stolen, love betrayed, and love gloriously recaptured. Throughout this dance Gigi moves adroitly, threatened by jealousy and attempts to dominate her.
Gigi works with David Melville, a tenderly seductive young art director who has been appointed her creative "teammate" by the two humorous and talented bachelors, Archie Rourke and Byron Bernheim, who head the agency. The third partner, Victoria Frost, is a severe beauty with an intensely secret life. Her enmity toward Gigi never dies. Daughter of Millicent Frost Caldwell, the grande dame of American advertising, Victoria is a powerful adversary who cannot be ignored.
Billy Winthrop Ikehorn Orsini Elliott, the impulsive heroine of Scruples, and her husband, Spider Elliott, are busy with their twin babies and the painful problems of their marriage.. Gigi's canny father, the movie producer Vito Orsini, is more in- volved than ever in his multiple intrigues, and her best friend, Sasha Nevsky, is up to her ravishingly lofty eyebrows in trouble.
The action in Lovers moves rapidly from advertising agencies in New York and Los Angeles to a major film: location in Mon- tana; from Ben Winthop's palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice to Billy Elliott's Left Bank mansion in Paris. Gigi's clients include Indigo Seas swimwear, designed for women with abbondanza; The Enchanted Attic, a chain of wondrous children's stores; as well as the most distinguished and exclusive of cruise lines.
Lovers is an effervescent and inventive novel in which every page is utterly entertaining. The relationships are surprising yet eventually inevitable, the sadnesses and joys deeply human, the victories hard-won, and the triumphs deserved.
JUDITH KRANTZ's last novel was Scruples Two, her seventh major bestseller. She and her husband, Steve, live in Bel Air, California.