Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace is a novel by the American writer Danielle Steel, published in 2007. It works in the familiar shape of her fiction, following a small group of people whose lives cross by accident and are reordered by a single night, but the accident here is a natural disaster rather than a meeting.

On a warm May evening the Ritz-Carlton ballroom in San Francisco fills with a celebrity charity crowd, and shortly before midnight the room begins to move, the glass breaks and the lights go out. In the days that follow, four guests are thrown into one another's company: Sarah Sloane, the wife of a financial operator whose dealings are exposed when the blackout stops him covering them; Melanie Free, a nineteen-year-old Grammy winner who walks away from her platform shoes and her mother's management to help; Everett Carson, a war photographer reduced to covering society parties; and Maggie Kent, a nun who works with the homeless and ends up running a refugee camp.

The four become each other's support as the ruined city begins to work again, and each of them has to decide what to do with the life the earthquake has exposed rather than simply repair the one they had. Steel published the book through Delacorte Press in October 2007 as her seventy-third novel.