Paradise
McNaught's most commercially and critically successful contemporary novel. Meredith Bancroft and Matthew Farrell's reunion years after he was driven out of her life. The retrospective romance structure forces both characters to reckon with who they've become, and McNaught writes the emotional confrontations with operatic intensity.
Eleven years of estrangement rest on her father's sabotage and a lie about an abortion that one honest conversation would have dissolved. McNaught needs seven hundred pages to arrange that conversation. Boardroom maneuvering pads the middle, and Matt's punitive courtship (forcing Meredith's hand through a hostile business play) reads colder now than it read in 1991.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
