The Valentine House

Author/Guide: Emma Henderson

Why a Booktrail?

1914 onwards: A family saga unravels in the French Alps

ISBN: 978-1444704020
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

Sir Anthony Valentine, a keen mountaineer, arrives with his family to spend the summer in their chalet, high in the French Alps. At the same time, a foundling girl Mathilde starts work as a servant -picked like the other girls to ensure they don’t catch Sir Anthony’s roving eye.

Mathilde might be one of the so called ‘uglies’ but for her it’s a new start and an exciting chance to work with “les anglais” – people she’s never seen before in her old farming life and wonders if they will be different to how she’s imagined them in her head. Other people who reveal themselves to be very different to outside facades are the Valentines themselves

Slowly, Mathilde discovers the key to the mystery. And in 1976, the year Sir Anthony’s great-great grandson comes to visit, she must decide whether to use it.

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Travel Guide

The French Alps

This book, or rather the “poems” of Sir Anthony Valentine is going to ensure that you never quite see the French Alps in the same way again. He sits in his house in the mountains and writes sexual odes to them along the lines or referring them to certain body parts and states of arousal.

There are only plain girls working as servants in the house and surrounds for Anthony has a roving eye. They are seen as strange and best kept our of sight but that’s nothing compared to the crazy “rosbifs” who inhabit the house

The Valentine house is Arete, (stop) a large chalet in the mountains overlooking the village of Hext. (both fictional of course) Valentine built it and generations of Valentines use it as their summer house

Follow this link to see some of the real people, places and links that inspired Emma Henderson to write THE VALENTINE HOUSE.

The Alpine Club created here is one which lingers and one which continues with order and tradition long after each generation bows out. The outdoor physical challenges known as Paideia for example, the banter and competition between visitors to the house and the mountains themselves are all evolving.