Cupcakes at Carrington’s (Carringtons Department Store 1) (36 page)

BOOK: Cupcakes at Carrington’s (Carringtons Department Store 1)

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Carla Berryman for being excited and making me crack up with your ‘Loub-for-a-phone’ pic.

Jadzia Kopiel for changing my life, you’re the wisest woman I know.

My lovely, supportive father-in-law, Dr Brown, for sharing the memories of his family’s department store, Brown’s in Newtownards, I hope I’ve captured a whiff of the memory.

Yeeman To, for being a fantastic sales assistant and telling me all about it, your generosity is very much appreciated and any exaggerations or fabrications are totally down to me.

C and L for bringing my beautiful, vivacious and funny daughter, QT, into my life while writing this book.

QT for making me whole again, I love you sweetheart with all my heart xoxoxo. Oh gawd, I’m going to cry.

My husband Paul, aka Cheeks, for ‘knowing’ it would happen, for the plot brainstorming sessions and for telling me what happens next when I had no idea and just wanted to run away and stuff my face with cake. I love you, now go and get me a cheeky box of macaroons …

And you lovely reader for picking up this book and actually buying it. I really really hope you love it, that it makes you laugh, that it makes you cry but most of all you tell everyone you know just how fabulous it is, and yes, I have no shame but then would you if you once did a running bodyslam at the hottest actor on earth, only to fall flat on your face and have the whole thing posted on YouTube by someone who is no longer a friend, natch?!? Hmm, exactly!

Footnotes

1
.
Cupcakes at Carrington’s
perfume is Jean Paul Gaultier Classique.

About the Author

Alexandra grew up in Brighton and left school at sixteen to run away to London with dreams of being a writer. On realising that she needed a proper job too, she went to work in an office.

Throughout her twenty-year corporate career, she survived many dull meetings by writing a scene or two, until she could bear it no longer and collapsed in a heap and begged her husband to support her while she lounged on a chaise and waited for the muse to arrive. He’s now living in hope that she’ll become rich and famous so he can retire to sun himself by an infinity pool somewhere exotic.

After escaping office life, Alexandra won a competition run by
The London Paper
to write the weekly City Girl column, an exposé of working life in the City of London. She wrote the column for two years before giving it up to concentrate on her first novel.

Alexandra lives in a rural village near Brighton with her husband, daughter and two very shiny black Labradors.

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Alexandra Brown asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Source ISBN: 9780007488230

EPub Edition © January 2013 ISBN: 9780007488247

Version 1

FIRST EDITION

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