High Time
High stakes and high jinx in the world of art and finance
-
-
3.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
'One of the wittiest writers around' Good Housekeeping
'The perfect summer read: mischievous and delicious. I devoured it in one go.' Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace
WHEN THE STAKES ARE HIGH, HOW LOW WILL YOU GO?
Ayesha Scott has a perfect life. Home is an art-filled Cornish castle with her stratospherically wealthy, titled husband and their beloved daughter. But behind every realised dream lurks an unexploded nightmare and in the course of one day Ayesha discovers that she will be penniless, homeless and powerless unless she can outwit the international mafia, infiltrate the world of high finance and make backstreet deals with the shadiest members of the art world.
Hurt and betrayed, she's determined to fight for herself and her daughter – but can she do it without enlisting the help of her beloved, deeply eccentric but estranged family?
Sharp escapist fiction, High Time is a novel about high stakes and high jinx set in the world of high art and high finance.
'Reads like a thrilling fairground ride version of Downton Abbey' Independent
'An entertaining and arch caper' Grazia
'Something Nancy Mitford and Jilly Cooper might have cooked up' The Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this convulsively comic sequel to Rothschild's House of Trelawney, eight years have passed since Ayesha, the illegitimate daughter of the Earl of Trelawney, married older financier Sir Thomlinson Sleet, who bought her the Trelawneys' decrepit castle. Now, in her husband's frequent absence, Ayesha takes care of their daughter, Stella, and works to restore the property to its former glory. When Ayesha discovers Sleet plans to divorce her and sell the castle for millions of pounds that, according to her lawyer, she will never see, she embarks on an ingenious plan to buy the castle out from under Sleet. But how can she succeed when she only has £27,000 in the bank? Her complex scheme goes on to affect not only the other eccentric members of the extended Trelawney clan, but also a glamorous bitcoin billionaire married to an Albanian mobster and Sleet's plan to run for MP on a nativist platform. The author makes Ayesha a virtuous heroine and Sleet a villain well worth hissing. With scenes that are over-the-top hilarious and a sharply satiric view of late-stage capitalism, this plays like a savvy cross between Brideshead Revisited and Succession as written by the Monty Python troupe.
