The Handsome Brandons

The Handsome Brandons opens in a world where beauty and loss stand side by side: the proud, fading Brandon estate, the ominous heights of Angry Mountain, and the bitter rivalry that has long shadowed an old Irish family. The narrator, intimate and observant, describes a household clinging to dignity amid poverty, where ancestral rooms, preserved gowns, wild children, and the iron rule of the housekeeper Oona all testify to a once-great life in decline. Across the landscape looms Sir Rupert De Lacy, cruel, wealthy, and dangerous, his bloodhounds and steward Gaskin embodying the threat he poses not only to Brandon's future but to its very soul. Beneath this present danger lies a deeper history of betrayal: Rupert's failed courtship, his cunning betrayal of the grandfather, and the copper-rich land that made him rich while impoverishing the Brandons. Yet the novel also offers warmth and refuge in Aline's sunlit room, in the family's affection, and in the narrator's passion for books. At Rose Hill, a newly revived house and its treasured library become a sanctuary, until the stern General MacNeill arrives to challenge the narrator's quiet, joyful claim upon it. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.