Once Fatima Monsour was the unluckiest of women, poor, childless and abandoned by her husband, in her tiny village on Djerba, a time warp with dusty lanes smelling of the passage of donkeys. Her sister's accidental death in Paris changed her life, when she immigrated to take her place as the maid to a cantankerous, rich countess. But Fatima has since inherited the countess's ritzy apartment, moved downstairs from her chambre de bonne and married Hippolyte, the sensitive, shy Frenchman who, in his awkward way, swept her off her feet.Meanwhile, her enduring affection for the late countess drives her on an urgent mission to save the countess's irascible and endangered daughter from perdition. FORTUNE'S SECOND WINK, while full of good-natured humour and fantasy, gives us an incisive take on human relations.