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Multi-talented superstar Joan Collins' best selling novels Star Quality and Infamous are now paired together for the ultimate read! Whether it's her portrait of one Hollywood icon's triumph over forces threatening both her personal and professional life in Infamous, or the thriller grip of betrayal, sex, and survival in Star Quality, Collins is sure to entertain any reader with her tales.
Infamous: Katherine Bennet is the star who has made "The Skeffingtons" the most watched TV soap opera in America. She has money, fame, power, but her private life is in tatters. Newly divorced, with a son threatening to go off the rails, Katherine promises herself and her public that she will never marry again. But she underestimates the sheer isolation of being as famous as she is - a woman sought out by the wrong people for the wrong reasons and avoided by all the right people. Such isolation makes a woman vulnerable - especially to the wrong man.
Joan Collins evokes the glamorous decade in which she emerged as a world superstar in "Dynasty". This novel is an engrossing and utterly realistic portrait of what it is like to be a woman with everything the world can offer - except the one thing she wants above all: someone who truly loves the real Katherine Bennet.
From Library Journal:
Collins, wearing her novelist's hat, here writes about what she knows best: trashy prime-time dramas, egotistical stars, and the fawning masses.
From Kirkus Reviews:
...Infamous - a perfectly publishable Hollywood glamour-soap...
Teasing readers with the possibility of a roman a clef, Collins makes her heroine a TV superstar, one Katherine Bennet of The Skeffingtons, a successful prime-time soap about a "dysfunctional family" of southern California winemakers. Called Kitty by her friends and the "Georgia poison peach" by an adoring public, Katherine is the actress all America loves to loathe. But in Collins's version (reversing the actual casting on her own real-life, long-running show, Dynasty), Kitty is an American, though the parts of the other two major Skeffs are played by Brits: an older man with ego and toupee problems, and a blond costar (who isn't, naturally, Linda Evans), a nasty, silicone-enhanced former child star who's carrying on a secret mud-slinging publicity campaign against Kitty. Slogging through 14-hour days on the set, eating endless meals of tunafish and rice cakes to stay thin, Kitty negotiates her trials and tribulations with the help of her cellular phone and a huge personal staff: agent, manager, publicist, secretary, maid, maid's husband, etc. Nightly, meanwhile, she bemoans the fact that, though famous, she's also loveless. So Katherine is easy pickings for the sexy sociopath she chooses to marry. How she eludes this homicidal husband (while wearing an 18th-century costume) as he pursues her through the predawn streets of Venice is a camp climax worthy of the Collins oeuvre, onscreen and off.
....some interesting background on what happens behind the scenes of a TV series.
Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selection!
Star Quality: When gutsy Irish redhead Millie McClancey defies her humble beginnings to pursue a life on the stage, she becomes the first of four generations of unforgettable women to taste success in the exciting yet precarious world of show business. Taking readers on a breathtaking journey from the music halls of World War I London to the glitz of Broadway and from Hollywood in its heyday right up to the present, Star Quality is a gripping tale of ambition, betrayal, sex, and survival. Joan Collins is a legendary woman with stardom in her genes, and with Star Quality she'll enchant readers nationwide with this engrossing and thrilling page-turner.
Genre: Romance
Infamous: Katherine Bennet is the star who has made "The Skeffingtons" the most watched TV soap opera in America. She has money, fame, power, but her private life is in tatters. Newly divorced, with a son threatening to go off the rails, Katherine promises herself and her public that she will never marry again. But she underestimates the sheer isolation of being as famous as she is - a woman sought out by the wrong people for the wrong reasons and avoided by all the right people. Such isolation makes a woman vulnerable - especially to the wrong man.
Joan Collins evokes the glamorous decade in which she emerged as a world superstar in "Dynasty". This novel is an engrossing and utterly realistic portrait of what it is like to be a woman with everything the world can offer - except the one thing she wants above all: someone who truly loves the real Katherine Bennet.
From Library Journal:
Collins, wearing her novelist's hat, here writes about what she knows best: trashy prime-time dramas, egotistical stars, and the fawning masses.
From Kirkus Reviews:
...Infamous - a perfectly publishable Hollywood glamour-soap...
Teasing readers with the possibility of a roman a clef, Collins makes her heroine a TV superstar, one Katherine Bennet of The Skeffingtons, a successful prime-time soap about a "dysfunctional family" of southern California winemakers. Called Kitty by her friends and the "Georgia poison peach" by an adoring public, Katherine is the actress all America loves to loathe. But in Collins's version (reversing the actual casting on her own real-life, long-running show, Dynasty), Kitty is an American, though the parts of the other two major Skeffs are played by Brits: an older man with ego and toupee problems, and a blond costar (who isn't, naturally, Linda Evans), a nasty, silicone-enhanced former child star who's carrying on a secret mud-slinging publicity campaign against Kitty. Slogging through 14-hour days on the set, eating endless meals of tunafish and rice cakes to stay thin, Kitty negotiates her trials and tribulations with the help of her cellular phone and a huge personal staff: agent, manager, publicist, secretary, maid, maid's husband, etc. Nightly, meanwhile, she bemoans the fact that, though famous, she's also loveless. So Katherine is easy pickings for the sexy sociopath she chooses to marry. How she eludes this homicidal husband (while wearing an 18th-century costume) as he pursues her through the predawn streets of Venice is a camp climax worthy of the Collins oeuvre, onscreen and off.
....some interesting background on what happens behind the scenes of a TV series.
Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selection!
Star Quality: When gutsy Irish redhead Millie McClancey defies her humble beginnings to pursue a life on the stage, she becomes the first of four generations of unforgettable women to taste success in the exciting yet precarious world of show business. Taking readers on a breathtaking journey from the music halls of World War I London to the glitz of Broadway and from Hollywood in its heyday right up to the present, Star Quality is a gripping tale of ambition, betrayal, sex, and survival. Joan Collins is a legendary woman with stardom in her genes, and with Star Quality she'll enchant readers nationwide with this engrossing and thrilling page-turner.
Genre: Romance
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