What happens when, out of the blue, you're given a second chance: a second chance at love; a second chance at real happiness? Do you seize the moment, and to hell with the consequences? Or do you take the safer option and opt for life in the slow lane? This is what Mel must decide. Having recovered from a damaging love affair in her early twenties and a subsequent failed marriage, she has rebuilt her life in the sleepy town of Butterfield, Vermont, where she runs an art gallery. Her best friend Joanne lives next door, and she has just met Lisa, an exotic and talented potter who, newly pregnant, has recently moved to the country with her husband Ben. Life is on its customary even keel, and Mel intends to keep it that way. But Lisa's sudden and tragic miscarriage awakens in Mel memories of her own past; memories of loss so traumatic that she has kept them buried deep in her psyche for most of her adult life. What Mel hasn't realised, however, is that Lisa, depressed and increasingly adrift in a landscape in which she feels alienated, has decided to cut free from Butterfield and from Ben. Devastated, Ben turns to Mel for reassurance, and their relationship, begun in friendship, soon turns into passion so intense that it precludes all else. While Mel begins to revel in her new-found happiness, she knows too that she must make decisions that will have far reaching consequences. TOUCHING THE SKY is that rare thing: a sweeping romantic novel of hope and the possibility of happy endings that speaks to women of all ages.