House of Gold
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4.2 • 33 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
From the New York Times bestselling author of The House at Tyneford, an epic family saga about a headstrong Austrian heiress who will be forced to choose between the family she's made and the family that made her at the outbreak of World War I.
The start of a marriage. The end of a dynasty.
It's 1911 and Greta Goldbaum is forced to move from glittering Vienna to damp England to wed Albert, a distant cousin. The Goldbaum family are one of the wealthiest in the world, with palaces across Europe, but as Jews and perpetual outsiders they know that strength lies in family. At first defiant and lonely, slowly Greta softens toward Albert, and as the wild paths and untamed beauty of Greta's new English garden begin to take shape, so too does their love begin to blossom. But World War I looms and even the influential Goldbaums cannot alter its course. For the first time in two hundred years, the family will find itself on opposing sides, and Greta will have to choose: the family she's created, or the one she left behind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set on the eve of WWI, this engrossing family epic by Solomons (The House at Tyneford) draws back the curtains on the opulent life of a European banking dynasty just as its world begins to shatter. The scions of the House of Goldbaum know their duties: marry other Goldbaums and serve the family. Even rebellious Greta Goldbaum will not risk her place in the family, and she obediently leaves her beloved Vienna to become the perfect English wife for her cousin, Albert. She had hoped he harbored a wild streak like their French cousin Henri or shared her brother Otto's sweetness, but she finds his passion for beetles and butterflies as horrifying as he finds her penchant for not wearing shoes. Their opposites-attract romance is palpable from their first encounter, and the turmoil roiling around them is just as captivating. Across Europe, the Goldbaums navigate what the reader knows to be inevitable: Russian pogroms, socialist reform, and the Great War itself. Though the family itself is close-knit, isolation permeates their lives as Jewish people in an increasingly anti-Semitic Europe, as oligarchs in a democratizing world, as individuals drowning beneath expectation. In Solomons's skillful hands, the plot winds around Europe and blossoms into a poignant portrait of characters stuck in an unavoidable paroxysm of global change.
Customer Reviews
The house of gold
Loved the book as soon as I got all the Characters straight. But a lot of redundancy: garden, food, etc. I wish there was more about Otto’s friend Karl. I suppose that is the next book. The end was so abrupt that I thought I misses pages.
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