House of Trelawney by Hannah Rothschild review – comic family saga
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/13/house-of-trelawney-by-hannah-rothschild-review
Cash-strapped aristocrats inhabit a world of vulgar greed and tasteful snobbery in this escapist satire
Cornwall is once again big in fiction and film. Whether your image of it is indebted to Poldark and Daphne du Maurier, or gritty nonfiction accounts of financial struggle such as Catrina Davies’s Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed and Gavin Knight’s The Swordfish and the Star, it has become the inspiration both for our loveliest dreams and post-Brexit nightmares.
Hannah Rothschild’s second novel is a multi-generational family saga of the kind popular in the 1980s. Revolving around the aristocratic and dysfunctional Trelawneys as they struggle to deal with the financial crash of 2008, their own bad choices and their crumbling 800-year-old castle, it moves between the lush coast of south Cornwall and the high-rise sterility of the City of London. Jane, the 24th earl’s daughter-in-law, is struggling to feed the family on supermarket mince, but her resilience will be sorely tested by a new arrival: Ayesha, daughter of her university friend Anastasia, who vanished from England to marry an Indian maharaja 20 years ago. Now dying, Anastasia entrusts her only child to the care of Jane and her other old friend Blaze, the earl’s daughter, who is brilliant at finance but a failure at love. Nobody will ever be the same again.
Continue reading...
(Read comments)
Post a comment in response:
scribbld is part of the horse.13 network
Design by Jimmy B.
Logo created by 
hitsuzen.
Scribbld System Status
