Three words for goodbye A novel

Clara and Madeleine are summoned to their ailing grandmother's estate in winter 1937 to hear a startling request: she wants the sisters to take a trip to Europe together. Coming just before Clara's wedding to a successful if unimaginative businessman, and with the two sisters prone to squabbling at the slightest provocation, the trip seems fraught with challenges from the outset. But Madeleine is eager to jump-start her career as a journalist by seeking out stories the Continent might hold as it lurches toward war, and Clara's fiancé has already agreed to the trip, so they grant their grandmother's request. She gives them keepsakes from her friend, the world traveler and journalist Nellie Bly, and three letters to deliver as they journey to Paris, Venice, and Austria, with their return set aboard the Hindenburg. As the sisters learn to embrace the unexpected, from a hot-air-balloon ride to the men they meet on their travels, they grapple with their own futures as they learn more about their grandmother's past. Charming historical fiction.

Gaynor and Webb (Meet Me in Monaco) return with a slight historical romance. In 1937, worldly East Hampton, N.Y., matriarch Violet Bell is dying. She sends her adult granddaughters, Clara and Maddie, to Europe with letters to convey her final goodbyes to faraway loved ones. Inseparable during childhood, the girls have clashed since artist Clara's recent engagement to real estate developer Charles Hancock, whose rapaciousness Maddie finds deplorable. Meanwhile, Clara secretly longs for her older, married art tutor, while the brilliant but awkward Maddie wants to break into journalism. The sisters cross the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, share a compartment on the Orient Express, continue by train to Austria, and, before returning via the ill-fated Hindenburg, see the sights of Paris, Venice, and Vienna. While discovering things about themselves and their family, they bond, just as Violet had hoped. Each chooses a worthy man without discarding her identity or ambitions, and the story doesn't end with everyone tidily married off. Overall, though, the authors prize travelogue over deep feeling, and despite frequent mentions of Hitler and Mussolini, the ominous historical currents receive short shrift, and there is little to distinguish the protagonists as women of the 1930s . It's diverting, but not particularly impressive. Agent: Michelle Brower, Aevitas Creative Management. (July)