ashenden

Ashenden

ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Wilhide, Elizabeth, PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster, Perfect for fans of "Downton Abbey," a beautifully atmospheric novel about an English country house and the people who inhabit it, upstairs and downstairs, over the course of 240 years. ""The house contains time. Its walls hold stories. Births and deaths, comings and goings, people and events passing through. For now, however, it lies suspended in a kind of emptiness, as if it has fallen asleep or someone has put it under a spell. This silence won't last: can't last. Something will have to be done." "When brother and sister Charlie and Ros discover that they have inherited their aunt's much-loved house, they must decide if they should sell it. Moving back in time, in an interwoven narrative spanning two and a half centuries, we meet those who have built the house, lived in it and loved it, worked in it, and those who would subvert it to their own ends, including the original architect as he directs the building of the house, the big Victorian family who happily live there for forty years, the maid who thinks her problems will be solved if she steals a small bibelot, the soldiers who are billeted there during World War I, the speculator who holds a treasure hunt there during the Roaring Twenties, the young couple who restores it during the s, and the house's final owner. A novel about people, architecture, and living history, "Ashenden" is an evocative portrait of a house that becomes a character as compelling as the people who inhabit it.