The Sunlight On The Garden: A Family In Love, War And Madness

Description

In 1880 Ada Curtis bore Gerald Howard the first of several illegitimate children. Ada was a housemaid, the daughter of a Lincolnshire butcher. Gerald was her employer and the son of a once-grand family now obsessed with its own threadbare nobility. They thereby sent their descendants tumbling chaotically into the twentieth century. More than a century later, inspired by the stories, re-inventions and half-truths in her family's past, Elizabeth Speller - Gerald and Ada's great-granddaughter - set out to trace the criss-crossing lines of their history. As she herself recovered from a mental breakdown, she began to wonder if that history offered any explanation of what had happened in her own life. The search brings vividly to life the passions and hopes of four generations, amid tales of wealth inherited and lost, eccentricity, sexual indiscretion and madness. Ultimately this book will remain in the memory as a beautifully realised sequence of portraits of mothers and daughters.

Elizabeth Speller is a poet and journalist, and has written for the Observer, Independent on Sunday and Woman's Journal, and appeared on Radio 4. Her previous books include Athens: A New Guide, Granta City Guides Rome, published by Granta. She lives in Gloucestershire, and teaches poetry and creative writing at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge.

* 'An extraordinary moving book... like opening a jewellery box packed with beautiful, unusual gems' Marian Keyes * 'I've never read a more terrifying description of depression and madness. I loved it, all of it, at once 'Joanna Lumley * 'Fabulously written'Evening Herald (Dublin) * There are echoes of Sylvia Plath's ability to combine beauty with irony, and suffering with comedy, and to translate the opacity of madness into lucidity' TLS * 'Enthralling mixture of social history and intimacy, tragedy and humour' Victoria Glendinning