Shortlisted for the Galaxy Popular Fiction Book of the Year Award 2011.
Rachel has always been at the centre of her family of three sons but now the youngest is getting married. She must learn to adjust to the changing dynamics within the various new relationships. This is the author at her absolute best, a first rate read.
Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 17 March 2011.
The Lovereading view...
Joanna Trollope cleverly weaves together an involving family drama in which the matriarchal mother finds herself suddenly bereft of her 3 sons as they marry and their wives try to create some distance between them and the mother-in-law. A power struggle develops and as it does people are going to get hurt. As with all of Joanna Trollope's novels they are packed with emotion and the characters incredibly well drawn.
A captivating new novel from the master of domestic drama.As the youngest of their three sons marries and Anthony and Rachel Brinkley welcome their third daughter-in-law to the family, no one quite realizes the profound shift about to take place. For their different reasons, the two previous daughters-in-law hadn't been able to resist Rachel's maternal clout and Anthony's gentle charms, and had settled into Brinkley family life without rocking the boat. But Charlotte very young, very beautiful and semi-spoiled has no intention of sharing power with her mother-in-law, and sets out to vanquish the matriarch. Soon Rachel's sons begin to treasonously think of their own houses as home, and of their mother's house as simply the place where their parents live a necessary shift of loyalties that sets off fireworks in their mother's brain, breaks their father's heart and causes unexpected waves in their own marriages.A lovely, candid and hugely perceptive exploration of what happens inside every family when one generation, with its ways and habits, has to make way for the next and everyone needs to learn what family love means all over again.From the Hardcover edition.
Joanna Trollope was our Guest Editor in February 2012 - click here - to see the books that inspired her writing.
Joanna Trollope OBE has written numerous highly-acclaimed contemporary novels including: The Choir, A Village Affair, A Passionate Man, The Rector’s Wife, The Men and the Girls, A Spanish Lover, The Best of Friends, Next of Kin, Other People’s Children, Marrying the Mistress, Girl from the South, Brother and Sister, Second Honeymoon, Friday Night, The Other Family, Daughters-in-Law andThe Soldier's Wife. Under the name of Caroline Harvey she writes romantic historical novels. She has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia’s Daughters.
Joanna Trollope was appointed OBE in the 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to literature and was the Chair of Judges for the Orange Prize form Fiction 2012.
