Search - Fashionably Late: A Novel

Karen Kahn is the spitting image of the harried New York executive in those 1980s Donna Karan clothing ads. The comparison is apt, because tall, somewhat hefty, 42-year-old Karen is the creative genius behind KKInc., a fashion design company poised for expansion into both high-end international couture and domestic mass market. To meet those goals Karen's handsome husband and business manager, Jeffrey, is soliciting a financing deal with multimillionaire Bill Wolper, whose discount clothes may be shoddy but who knows how to make a buck. But Karen can't concentrate on business now: She's just learned that she's unable to bear children, and, an adoptee herself, she soon becomes obsessed with finding her anonymous birth mother and adopting a child. Eventually she agrees to a ``real deal'' with her husband: She'll sign her company over to Wolper in exchange for the reluctant Jeffrey's cooperation as an adoptive dad.

Great book

This author also wrote "The First Wives' Club"

From Publishers Weekly
Prominent designer Karen Kahn has just won the fashion industry's top achievement award. As this witty, energetic and sometimes caustic novel quickly shows, however, it's all downhill from there. Karen's company, KK Inc., needs a huge infusion of cash to expand, and her handsome but evasive husband, Jeffrey, who handles the finances, pushes for a $50 million buyout by the megacorporation NormCo. But will Karen lose control of her designs? And how ethically does NormCo run its business? This new novel by the author of The First Wives Club works at every level. An engaging, behind-the-scenes look at the fashion industry, it lays bare the frenetic pace, cutthroat competition and chronic backbiting of the world of couture. Also an engrossing family saga, it shows 40-year-old Karen, who is infertile, desperately trying to adopt a baby and, as an adopted child herself, searching for her birth mother. The narrative also offers a hilariously dark portrait of Karen's immediate--and totally dysfunctional--family. A glittering New York social backdrop, plenty of namedropping, romance, some outstandingly creative characters and a mystic who applies a unique hex add up to a book that fairly hums with excitement