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2000s: A family meet up to bury their matriarch
2000s: A family meet up to bury their matriarch
The Brookes are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home – twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone – to bury Philip, the head of the family – the blinding sun around which they have all orbited for as long as they can remember.
Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe. Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where under the influence of psychedelic drugs a new ruling class will be reborn. Each believes their father has given them his blessing and are set on a collision course with the other.
Isa has long suspected that her father thought only of himself, and only hopes to seek out her childhood love, who still lives on the estate, to discover whether it is her feelings for him that are creating the fault lines in her marriage.
And then there is Clara, who arrives in their midst from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture all the dreams on which they’ve built their lives.
Sussex
The large mansion house in the novel is clearly set in Sussex but the location apart from that only plays a minor role in the story. The real story is about the house and its inhabitants.
Still, some lovely descriptions of rural England and that house full of secrets made from sussex sandstone.
Destination/location: Sussex Author/guide: Anna Hope Departure Time: 2000s
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