A Better World Than This — Marie Joseph

In a small Lancashire cotton town in the 1930s, Daisy Bell dreams her life away. At twenty-six, still a spinster and heiress to her mother's potato pie shop, she's resigned to a lonely old age. But toiling over the bake-house fire she dreams of a better world - a world of glamour and romance as seen on the silver screen. Then she meets Sam a dashing Clark Gable look-alike and chauffeur to a wealthy London businessman - and suddenly her life is changed forever... and the woman who had resigned herself to being an 'old maid', finds herself embarking on an affair with a married man.

Winner of the Romantic Novel of the Year Award (1987) by the Romantic Novelists' Association.