House of Trelawney - Hannah Rothschild Kartoniert (TB)

From the author of The Improbability of Love comes a dazzling novel both satirical and moving about an eccentric dysfunctional family of English aristocrats and their crumbling stately home demonstrating how the lives and hopes of women can be shaped by the ties of family and love. For more than seven hundred years the vast rambling Trelawney Castle in Cornwall--turrets follies a room for every day of the year four miles of corridors and 500 000 acres--was the magnificent and grand three dimensional calling card of the earls of Trelawney. By 2008 it is in a complete state of ruin due to the dulled ambition and the financial ineptitude of twenty-four earls two world wars the Wall Street crash and inheritance taxes. Still: the heir to all of it Kitto his wife Jane their three children their dog Kitto's ancient parents and his aunt Tuffy Scott an entomologist who studies fleas all manage to live there and (barely) keep it going. Four women dominate the story: Jane Kitto's sister Blaze who left Trelawney and made a killing in finance in London the wildly beautiful seductive and long-ago banished Anastasia and her daughter Ayesha. When Anastasia sends a letter announcing that her nineteen-year-old daughter Ayesha will be coming to stay the long-estranged Blaze and Jane must band together to take charge of their new visitor--and save the house of Trelawney. But both Blaze and Jane are about to discover that the house itself is really only a very small part of what keeps the family together.