Miss Cecily's Recipes for Exceptional Ladies

No woman dreams of being unceremoniously dumped and moving back in with her mother on the eve of her 40th birthday. Food technician Kate Parker's first response? Denial, long days under her duvet and bucket loads of cheesy pasta. A reluctant Kate finds herself volunteering at the Lauderdale House For Exceptional Ladies. There she meets 96-year-old Cecily Finn - spiky and sharp as a pin, but the spark has gone out of her. She has resigned herself to the imminent End.

Having no patience with Kate's self-pity, Cecily prescribes her a self-help book with a difference - it's a 1957 cookery manual, featuring menus for anything life can throw at 'the easily dismayed'. It promises the answers to essential life questions. So begins an unlikely friendship between two lonely and stubborn souls - one at the end of her life, and one stuck in the middle - who come to show each other that food is for feasting, life is for living and the way to a man's heart is . . . irrelevant!