The gift

On a June day, a young woman in a summer dress steps off a Chicago-bound bus into a small midwestern town.

She doesn't intend to stay. She is just passing through. Yet her stopping here has a reason and it is part of a story that you will never forget.

The time is the 1950s, when life was simpler, people still believed in dreams, and family was, very nearly, everything.

The place is a small midwestern town with a high school and a downtown, a skating pond and a movie house. And on a tree-lined street in the heartland of America, an extraordinary set of events begins to unfold. And gradually what seems serendipitous is tinged with purpose.

A happy home is shattered by a child's senseless death.

A loving marriage starts to unravel. And a stranger arrivesa young woman who will touch many lives before she moves on.

She and a young man will meet and fall in love. Their love, so innocent and full of hope, helps to restore a family's dreams. And all of their lives will be changed forever by the precious gift she leaves them.

The Gift, Danielle Steel's thirty-third best-selling work, is a magical story told with stunning simplicity and power.

It reveals a relationship so moving it will take your breath away. And it tells a haunting and beautiful truth about the unpredictabilityand the wonderof life.From the Paperback edition.