Lies and Weddings Kevin Kwan Hutchinson Heinemann, $34.99 Kevin Kwan’s fifth novel, Lies and Weddings , is dangerously absorbing and deceptively clever. Like all his books, it follows the eccentric personalities of the absurdly ultra-wealthy with a pixie-ish flair, not unlike the way Wes Anderson treats colour in his movies.
The story begins with a wedding between Lady Augusta Leung Gresham (daughter of The Right Honourable the Countess of Greshambury Arabella Leung Gresham and The Right Honorable the Earl of Greshambury Francis Gresham) and Prince Maximillian Zu Lichtenberg of Norway. (You can imagine the fun Kwan had in creating the names of his characters). As the mother of the bride, Arabella is in her element, pulling all the strings to ensure her eldest daughter’s wedding in Hawaii is nothing short of a Met Gala-level affair.
Much to her daughter’s despair, she’s also strategically using the wedding to launch the latest of her ultra-insiders resorts — part of her global lifestyle luxury brand, which she hopes to eventually sell off to a private equity group for billions. Less than 24 hours before the wedding, the bride mutates into a hot ball of rage when her mother insists she wear a couture Valentino dress that costs more than a two-storey sandstone in Sydney. The bride just wants to wear something charming by a local Hawaiian designer.
But their conflict is conveniently and unexpectedly interrupted by a volcanic eruption on the island, which literally split.
