GRACE AND FAVOR
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A spell-casting novel reminiscent of Brideshead Revisited, Grace and Favor (originally published by St. Martin’s Press in 1997) tells a tale of merchant banking scandals, family secrets and murder, set in the surprisingly still-enchanted world of England’s landed gentry.
John Brook, a contemporary, all but reluctant American expatriate, believes it is fate that has taken him from Washington to London. When he awakens to find his English wife Julia missing from their bed on the eve of a shooting weekend, he sets off in search of her through her family’s stately home. The conversation he overhears, soon magnified by Julia’s refusal to acknowledge it, is but the first in a series of ever more ominous events – wheels within wheels of intrigue, pitting a love of land against a lust for money – that threaten the couple’s future, their children, and their lives.
The hidden treacheries that underlie the novel’s beguiling, aristocratic, end-of-the-twentieth-century milieu will remind readers that, many generations on, such venues as Downton Abbey still remain suspended between history and possibility as they continue to shape the consciousness and destiny of their modern inhabitants.
“They don’t write them like this anymore. Grace and Favor is like a Battersea box: highly polished inside and out with surprises inside.” – Christopher Buckley, author of The Relic Master.
“A wry, sly look at trans-Atlantic mores through the eyes of a shrewd, observant, mid-Atlantic man. A most diverting read.” – Robert Stone, author of Dog Soldiers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A sensitive Yankee risks his life to join the British ruling class in this overweening financial thriller from anglophile Caplan (Line of Chance). Narrator John Brook, an American merchant banker living in London, has led a charmed life. Husband to the beautiful Lady Julia, father to twins with adorable accents, he spends his weeks in the city and weekends at Castlemoreland, his wife's family estate--where (he discovers to his dismay) aristocratic country life costs more than the average aristocrat, or merchant banker, has to spend. Fortunately, John is working on a deal that will leave him and his partners "wildly" rich if they succeed. But things have begun to go wrong: John learns from an overheard conversation that Julia is afraid of someone. Then, after two mysterious deaths in the family, John is accused in the press of insider trading (he was set up), and the ensuing scandal causes the investors to pull out of his big deal. A phone call from a rich, enigmatic investor leads John on a clandestine chase around the globe in hopes of salvaging the situation. For all the faux-Jamesian atmospherics (the "butterscotch glow" of lamps, the "depilious torsoes" of young men), and despite his sharp consciousness of class, Caplan has written a plain old American thriller, and a wobbly one at that. Not only are the relationships bloodless and sentimental, but the main character is impossible to believe in: when he isn't spouting transatlantic aper us, he's walking into what should be an obvious trap. FYI: Caplan is a founder of the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction.
