Eight years ago, Anne Elliot did the sensible thing — and has regretted it ever since. Young, impressionable, and persuaded by family and friends, she broke off her engagement to Captain Frederick Wentworth, a naval officer with more promise than fortune. Now the Elliot family is selling off its grandeur to pay its debts, Anne is twenty-seven and quietly overlooked, and Wentworth is back — decorated, admired, and very much unattached. So is Anne. What follows is Austen at her most warm and most knowing — a second chance at love, arrived at slowly, carefully, and with considerably more wisdom than the first. Some things, it turns out, are worth waiting eight years for.