The Inheritance: A Novel - Hardcover

Dilke, Annabel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031233477X ISBN 13: 9780312334772

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2005

Synopsis

Felicity Chandler remembers how her family was irrevocably changed by a series of events forty years earlier, including her engaged sister's affair with a disreputable man, her father's philandering and infidelity, and a betrayal that cut short Felicity's academic career at Oxford.

About this title

About the Author

Annabel Dilke is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter whose books have been shortlisted for numerous awards. THE INHERITANCE is her first book published in the United States. She lives in South London

From the Inside Flap

At Edgerton, their magnificent estate , the Chandlers seem to lead a charmed life. Surrounded by servants and cushioned by great wealth, they cling fiercely to the trappings of aristocracy and privilege in England of the Fifties and Sixties. Stunningly attractive eighteen-year-old Alice is marrying the heir to another great house while her more intellectual sister Eve has won a place at Oxford University. All is picture perfect. They are happy, revered and very, very rich.

But all is not what it seems.

As the day of her nuptials approaches, Alice is engaged in a secret liaison with a fatally handsome but wholly unsuitable lover. Her father is a compulsive philanderer whose chronic infidelity ultimately pushes his wife Felicity into the arms of another man. And Eve's academic future is about to be brutally curtailed by a cruel act of betrayal. Thirty years later, Felicity remembers that long ago wedding day when all of their lives changed forever.

Wonderfully sympathetic, funny and beguiling, THE INHERITANCE is the story of an unusual family and the very unexpected ways in which fate sometimes works. Intensely human and brilliantly drawn, it will shock, delight and completely seduce you.

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At Edgerton, their magnificent estate , the Chandlers seem to lead a charmed life. Surrounded by servants and cushioned by great wealth, they cling fiercely to the trappings of aristocracy and privilege in England of the Fifties and Sixties. Stunningly attractive eighteen-year-old Alice is marrying the heir to another great house while her more intellectual sister Eve has won a place at Oxford University. All is picture perfect. They are happy, revered and very, very rich.

But all is not what it seems.

As the day of her nuptials approaches, Alice is engaged in a secret liaison with a fatally handsome but wholly unsuitable lover. Her father is a compulsive philanderer whose chronic infidelity ultimately pushes his wife Felicity into the arms of another man. And Eve's academic future is about to be brutally curtailed by a cruel act of betrayal. Thirty years later, Felicity remembers that long ago wedding day when all of their lives changed forever.

Wonderfully sympathetic, funny and beguiling, THE INHERITANCE is the story of an unusual family and the very unexpected ways in which fate sometimes works. Intensely human and brilliantly drawn, it will shock, delight and completely seduce you.

Reviews

Dilke charts the inevitable end of an era in this soothingly predictable romantic saga about an aristocratic British family, the Chandlers. Lord Harry; his wife, Felicity; oldest daughter Eve; darling "turtledove" Alice; and youngest children Hugo and Kathy live decorously, if not always happily, at Edgarton, the country estate that's been in the family for 400 years. It's 1965, and Alice, the beauty of the family, has made a suitable match with a "decent" chap, her titled neighbor Edward. But she loves an unscrupulous horse dealer, Marcus, and their passion reignites after her marriage. Eve, the brains of the family and Alice's best friend, is at Oxford, reading Marx and dating her working-class boyfriend, Seb. Both girls see a reversal in fortunes when Alice suffers a botched abortion from her affair, and Eve is expelled from university for her involvement. Meanwhile, their parents carry on a sham of a marriage between pheasant shoots and dinner parties until Harry's relentless philandering culminates in an affair with a servant's nubile daughter. An anticlimactic epilogue set in 2002 details the Chandler's financial demise, the sisters' role reversal and a happy blurring of class lines. Readers who relish aristocratic glamour spiced with a little class conflict will be lured by this romance.
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The Chandlers--Felicity, Harry, and their children--are part of the English aristocracy and inhabit a splendid manor house called Edgerton. But by the 1960s, when daughter Alice (the beautiful one) gets married and daughter Eve (the clever one) goes to Oxford, the long tradition they have inherited is already starting to unravel. As the Chandlers' lives unfold over the years, with their share of minor scandals, financial setbacks, adulteries, and broken marriages, it becomes harder to sustain the veneer of amplitude and entitlement that Edgerton represents, and the house has been sold and turned into a hotel by the time everyone comes together to celebrate Felicity' s eightieth birthday. Dilke deftly employs multiple points of view to present her characters--rather ordinary people, really, just living, for a time, in a more privileged environment than yours or mine. Put this in the hands of readers who enjoy Rosamunde Pilcher's family-centered British fiction. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 031233477X
• ISBN 13: 9780312334772
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384