Safe Harbour

Safe Harbour is a novel by the American writer Danielle Steel, published by Delacorte Press in November 2003 and her sixty-first novel.

The friendship between the child and the painter is the book's engine, and it works because neither of them is asking for anything: Matt lost a daughter, Pip needs an adult who will talk to her rather than about her, and the arrangement gives Ophélie the space to begin the slow work of returning to her own life. Steel moves the story between the beach house and San Francisco, where Ophélie starts volunteering at a programme for homeless people, and the novel's later sections turn on a betrayal that makes her retreat again before Matt's steadiness gives her a way through it. The author's output is a genre of its own by this point in her career, and the book is assembled the way her readers expect: a small cast, a domestic catastrophe, a period of recovery and an ending that resolves the family rather than the plot. It was adapted into a film released directly to video.