About this item
From the author of The Improbability of Love: a dazzling novel both satirical and moving, about an eccentric, dysfunctional family of English aristocrats, and their crumbling stately home that reminds us how the lives and hopes of women can still 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 the 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 keep it going.
About the Author
Hannah Rothschild is the author of House of Trelawney; The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild; and The Improbability of Love which was shortlisted for the Bailley's prize for womens' fiction and won the PG Wodehouse, Everyman, Bollinger prize for best comic novel in 2016. Her feature length BBC/HBO documentaries have appeared at such festivals as Telluride and Tribeca. She's written for Vanity Fair, Vogue, The Independent, Elle, Bazaar, T and C, The Times, The Telegraph, the NYT and others. She's a vice president of the Hay Literary Festival, a former trustee of the Tate Gallery, and was the first woman chair of the National Gallery in London. In 2018 she was made a Commander of The British Empire for services to literature and philanthropy.
