Coronet Books
3 total works
Before Downton Abbey, there was Abingdon Pryory, the elegant country home of the Grevilles - a titled English family who, along with their servants, see their world turned upside down when England goes to war - and their well-kept lawns and whirling social seasons give way to the horrors of battle leaving no one, upstairs or downstairs, untouched.
Before "Downton Abbey", there was Abingdon Priory...The final installment of the saga of the Grevilles of Abingdon, beginning as the dizzy gaiety of the Jazz Age comes to a shattering end and concluding with German bombers coursing toward England. The theater of this books is the '30s, a decade of change and uncertainty, as all the old guidelines are swept away. "A Future Arrived" is a novel of the young, born during or just after "the war to end all wars". They grow to young adulthood as the inheritors of the hatred spawned by the Treaty of Versailles: Derek Ramsey, born only weeks after his father fell in France; the American writer, Martin Rilke, whose family roots in scandal entwine with those of the Stanmores, but who will conquer his questionable heritage by the worldwide fame that will soon come to him; the exquisitely beautiful Wood-Lacy twins, Jennifer and Victoria, and their passionate younger sister, Kate. In their heady youth and bittersweet growth to adulthood, they are the future-but the shadows that touched the lives of the generation before are destined to reach out to their own.
Before Downton Abbey, there was Abingdon Pryory...He drove up to Flanders in the early summer of 1921 knowing that it would be for the last time. He had finally, after nearly four years, reconciled himself to the unalterable fact that she was dead. So begins this haunting novel of war's aftermath and the search for love and hope in a world totally changed. A generation has been lost on the Western Front. The dead have been buried, a harsh peace forged in the halls of Versailles, and the howl of shells replaced by the wail of saxophones as the jazz age begins. But ghosts linger - that long-ago golden summer of 1914 tugging at the memory of Martin Rilke and his British cousins, the Grevilles. From the Countess to the chauffeur, the inhabitants of Abingdon Pryory seek to forget the past and adjust their lives to a new era in which old values, social codes, and sexual mores have been irretrievably swept away. "Circles of Time" captures the age as these strongly-drawn characters experience it, unfolding against England's most gracious manor house, the steamy nightclubs of London's Soho, and the despair of Germany caught in the nightmare of anarchy and inflation.