It's a famous masterpiece.a painting that 'has-a-history'. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.'The Improbability of Love', by Hannah Rothschild is not only the title of this Historicalįiction novel, but it's one of the characters, narrating part of the story. House of Trelawney by Hannah Rothschild is published by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (RRP £16.99). The problems real families in Cornwall face go far beyond the scope of this novel, but Rothschild’s tale is a lively and entertaining addition to its literature of escapism.Īmanda Craig’s The Golden Rule is published in June by Little, Brown. “Family is a thing you put up with,” as she says, and if one of her relations prefers to study beetles, you can’t blame them.įun of this kind is irresistible, even if its mildly satirical portrait of unearned privilege also palls. The castle, with its Grinling Gibbons woodwork and 11 staircases, is the real star of the show - literally, when Jane’s mother-in-law the appalling countess becomes an unexpected media celebrity on BBC Two. The dialogue and plot move at a cracking pace, and the sympathetically drawn characters are oven-ready for a TV series. An old enemy is prowling round, bent on revenge for a decades-old snub at Oxford, and his machinations involve Jane’s dim-witted husband and Blaze’s job. The Trelawneys all have crises of their own, involving money, and their loss of it. The beautiful, vivacious and apparently virginal Ayesha is Trouble. Rothschild, whose ebullient debut The Improbability of Love was set in the art world and won the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, takes us once again to a sphere of vulgar greed and tasteful snobbery. 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.

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. 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. Hannah Rothschild’s second novel is a multi-generational family saga of the kind popular in the 1980s.

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. C ornwall is once again big in fiction and film.

The improbability of love by hannah rothschild