Joanne and Gerry Dryansky: Fatima's Good Fortune

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

This story of a 40-year-old Arab woman who leaves her Tunisian home to become maid to an elderly French countess is quaintly, charmingly appealing - a fairytale, really, albeit set amid the shoddy realities and disappointments, but also the perennial zest, of today's Paris.

It reminded me strongly of earlier Joanne Harris - Chocolat, for instance - in its capturing of a community through incisive sketches of the lives of ordinary people, and in the way that romanticism and quiet joy sit alongside - and in the end override - some really unpleasant social realities and human failings.

Fatima has had little luck in her life. In fact, she's known as "the unluckiest woman in her village of Batouine".

Having supported her family from a very early age, she remained illiterate, and at the time the novel opens, works as a housemaid in a tourist resort, dreaming of saving money to travel to America, where her no-good, deserting ex-husband lives.

Fatima has never known romantic love, has no children. Yet she has a special quality, a kind of quiet, kind intuition, that draws people to her.

When her more worldly, adventurous sister dies in Paris, her sister's employer, the Countess du Roc, sends for her - and so begins Fatima's new life.

She is drawn into the lives of an odd assortment of people, mostly the habitues of a local cafe, and the other tenants of the countess' apartment building, and, yes, begins to take hesitant steps towards a romance of her own.

While Fatima's story provides an insight into the plight of illegal workers, and the indomitability of the class system, we're never in doubt that she represents an intrinsic power for good, and that "good" is often in the small print of life, in the little considerations that people undertake for each other.

As she begins to learn to read and write, her confidence and sense of purpose grow, and we feel our faith in human nature being quietly affirmed. If that's romance, then so be it.

* Hutchinson, $45