Inheritance
A Novel
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- £1.49
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- £1.49
Publisher Description
In this luminous novel about romance and illusion—and what's left of love when they're stripped away—an American Anglophile is drawn into the lives of a disintegrating aristocratic family.
After the sudden death of her husband, Annie Devereaux flees to England, site of the nostalgic fantasies her father spun for her before he deserted the family. A chance encounter in London leads Annie to cancel her return to New York and move in with Julian, the disaffected, moody son of Helena Denby, a famous British geneticist. As their relationship progresses, Annie meets Julian's sisters Isabel and Sasha, each of them fragile in her own way, and becomes infatuated with visions of their idyllic childhood in England's West Country. But the more she uncovers about Julian's past, the more he explodes into rage and violence. Finally tearing herself away, Annie winds up adrift in London, rescued from her loneliness only when she and Isabel form an unexpected bond.
Slowly, with Isabel as her reluctant guide, Annie learns of the emotional devastation that Helena's warped arrogance, her monstrous will to dominate, inflicted on her children. The family who once embodied Annie's idealized conception of England is actually caught in a nightmare of betrayal and guilt that spirals inexorably into tragedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The tepid latest from Toynton (The Oriental Wife) is a neo-Jamesian exploration of old-world versus new-world manners and morals as a young American woman in 1986 becomes obsessed with a tragedy-prone English family. After Annie Devereaux's husband dies, she travels from New York to London, where she meets the charming Julian Digby, who becomes her lover. He introduces her to his two sisters, Isabel, an author and single mother, and Sasha, who suffers from mental illness, and to the family matriarch, Helena, a famous geneticist with an imperious manner. After the affair with Julian abruptly ends, Annie begins a friendship with the emotionally fragile Isabel. Annie's writing career flourishes, and she finds a new love in Jack, an academic. But she is constantly drawn back to the Digbys, whose secrets lead to an inevitable tragedy. Like a distaff Nick Guest in Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty or Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (which receives mention here), Annie is the classic outsider obsessed with a seemingly glamorous family. But the story is made of too many competing story elements that don't dramatically cohere. In the end, Toynton takes a number of smartly drawn characters and leaves them stranded in an enervated narrative.
