Guests of Chance
Description
Colleen Curran returns with her latest novel, Guests of Chance, completing the hilarious trilogy that has taken readers through break-ups, make-ups, fierce friendships, a trip to Hollywood and everything in between. Starring Lenore Rutland, an unsophisticated but astute former singing waitress who owns a theme restaurant in Montreal, Guests of Chance is proof that life can be an adventure. The new novel picks up where Curran left off in Overnight Sensation. Without skipping a beat, our heroine finds herself nervously flying away from her beloved Montreal to England, all the while reflecting on her "star turn" at the Oscars. She has left behind her beloved partner Benoît and her collection of unique friends: Madame Ducharme, who is doing time for poisoning six of her fellow jurors when they let a murderer go free; heartbroken Viola, whose lesbian lover has left for Toronto with her much younger, slimmer and more glamorous new love interest; Heidi’s fireman brother Daniel, who hasn’t told their parents that he’s gay; Elspeth and her odious husband; and Madame’s spoiled lap dogs, Montcalm and Brioche. Lenore’s best friend Heidi, a professor of English, has persuaded Lenore to come to England with her for moral support as she tries to discover whether her handsome pen-pal "boyfriend" is the real deal. Akin to Bridget Jones’s Diary and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Guests of Chance is a laugh-filled romp with two inexperienced thirty-something travellers, enchanting new readers and making those who met Lenore in Something Drastic and Overnight Sensation fall in love with her all over again.
Reviews
Lenore Rutland deserves a holiday. What with custody of her jailed neighbour's yappy lapdogs, tracking her deadbeat boyfriend Fergie, and extreme encounters with a villainous feminist, Stanley Cup winners, and a trip to the Oscars, there's hardly time for this Montreal singing waitress to keep her theme restaurant afloat.
Now it looks like love has bloomed with Benoît, the dashing detective, but first, Lenore will have to play love cop herself. When her sensible best friend Heidi Flynn sets off for England to see whether her long-distance romance with Miles the Mountaineer is the real thing, Lenore goes along for the escapade of a lifetime. Her show-stopping, trail-blazing adventures not only implicate Noddy in Toy Town and the Brontë sisters but include thwarting a romp on the moors and eating fish and chips with scraps. And that's just a dress rehearsal for the life-altering twists and turns waiting for Lenore and Heidi at home. The comedy ends as comedies should, but in ways no one — not even Lenore herself — could ever predict.
In Guests of Chance, Lenore returns to enchant new friends and make those who met her in Something Drastic and Overnight Sensation fall in love with her all over again.
"A genius for satire."
"Colleen Curran plays for laughs and comes up with a winner."
"If Lenore is ingenuously wise, she's also dead-on funny."
"Colleen Curran plays for laughs and comes up with a winner."
- <i>Montreal Gazette</i>
"If there's such a thing as genial anarchy, then Curran knows how to create it."
- <i>National Post</i>
"Funny and refreshing... much fun to read."
"Sensational? You bet... Curran shows great dexterity in guiding a large cast through a complex plot."
"Funny and refreshing... much fun to read."
- <i>Geist</i>
"If there's such a thing as genial anarchy, then Curran knows how to create it."
"Sensational? You bet... Curran shows great dexterity in guiding a large cast through a complex plot."
- <i>Globe and Mail</i>
"If Lenore is ingenuously wise, she's also dead-on funny."
- <i>Montreal Review of Books</i>
"A genius for satire."
- <i>Chronicle Herald</i>