"A superb deftly woven novel . . . Anna Hope engages, head-on, with some of the most urgent and challenging issues facing the world today, and transforms them into spellbinding family drama."-Jonathan Coe, author of Mr. Wilder & Me
A finely crafted, propulsive, and nuanced story of family, inheritance, and accountability that shakes the country house novel to its foundations from the internationally acclaimed author of Expectation.
The Brookes are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home-twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone-to bury their patriarch, Philip. Father, grandfather, husband, landowner, one-time hippy, long-time philanderer, Philip was the blinding sun around which the family has orbited their entire lives.
Eldest daughter Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, mother to a daughter whose future she fears for, dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defense against the coming climate catastrophe. Her brother Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn to create a better world. Each believes their father has given them his blessing and are set on a collision course with the other.
Isa, Philip's estranged youngest child, only hopes to reconnect with her childhood love who still lives on the estate, to discover if her feelings for him are creating the fault lines in her marriage. Grace, bruised and diminished after fifty years in a loveless marriage, is at a crossroads, wondering whether she may finally have the strength to choose between freedom and duty. And then there is Clara, who arrives from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture the dreams on which they've built their lives.
Beautifully layered and utterly compelling, Anna Hope's multigenerational saga is a bold, brilliant, and deeply contemporary examination of family dynamics, colonial legacies, and class, set against the backdrop of the climate crisis.
