Harsh Realities in Soft Focus in This Cozy Tale

“Cozy” isn’t a word you’d expect to use in describing a story that touches, as Barbara Taylor Bradford’s 15th novel does, on child abuse, terminal cancer, bisexuality, divorce, art theft and the Holocaust, but it’s exactly the right word for “A Sudden Change of Heart.”

Child abuse, for instance, is the key to what puzzles Laura Valiant about the behavior of her lifelong friend Claire Benson: the timidity, the bitter distrust of men. But it takes place offstage. All Bradford shows us is the warmth Claire experiences on visits to Laura’s grandparents’ farm in Connecticut: the food, the decor, the horses, all presided over by ex-Broadway star Megan Morgan Valiant and her husband and manager, Owen, who is forever brewing mugs of strong, sweet “Welsh coal miner’s tea.”

Strong and sweet: That’s Laura, too. As a 7-year-old, she pulled 12-year-old Claire out of a river and wondered about the bruises on her back. Now, in the novel’s present, when both women have glamorous jobs in the international art and design worlds, Laura is a source of unfailing comfort for Claire, who is divorced from her husband, Philippe Lavillard, and trying to raise her 14-year-old daughter, Natasha, in Paris.

Laura may consider herself “odd, troubled, dysfunctional to a certain extent,” but nobody else is buying. She’s . . . valiant, no two ways about it. When her husband, Doug, runs off with another man, Laura cries for a while, bids him goodbye and forges on. We know she has something more exciting in store.

When Claire’s boss, Hercule Junot, reveals that Claire’s health is failing, Laura begins to shoulder Claire’s misfortune along with her own. This includes agreeing to become Natasha’s guardian and trying to arrange a reconciliation between Claire and Philippe, a globe-trotting epidemiologist who has “a body as hard as a rock” and eyes that are “dark and full of compassion.”

The topical issue in “A Sudden Change of Heart” is the appearance on the art market of paintings looted by the Nazis during World War II. Laura tracks some of them down on behalf of Sir Maximilian West, an elderly but dashing English industrialist whose German Jewish parents lost their whole art collection. She discovers that Philippe’s grandparents were similarly victimized.

Through all this, Laura is inspired by Grandma Megan, now 93 but still indomitable, who tells her: “Life is hard, and it always has been. The important thing is how you handle life and all of its hardships and pain.”

True, the hardships in this novel are rarely seen up close. The paintings are likable Matisses and Gauguins; the professional eminence is shown after the hard slogging is over; the decor is sumptuous; the food never causes heartburn; nobody is ugly or fat. But it’s no sillier a story, at bottom, than the typical male fantasy of grisly death and lethal machinery--and it’s a lot cozier. “I have never liked anything that makes me sad or depressed,” a Renoir-owning countess tells Laura. “I have the need to be uplifted by art.” Bradford’s readers undoubtedly would agree.