Cashelmara

By Susan Howatch, published in 1974. Certainly not a new book, but new to me.

This was actually sent to me by my Australian BookCrossing buddy, who told me it was one of her favorites. I liked it, and I do like this type of book, too. It is a style/genre that isn't written much any longer, but was very typical of the 1970s and 1980s -- the family epic novel. They became formulaic after a while, and deteriorated into glittery tomes where everyone was rich, alcoholic, sexually promiscuous, and gorgeous. But Cashelmara, like another favorite novel (To Serve Them All My Days), is more finely and skillfully drawn.

We begin with Edward, an English lord of mature years, a widower with four surviving and mostly adult children. Besides his London home, and his English estate, he also owns the family estate in Ireland known as Cashelmara.

On a trip to America, he meets some distant cousins, and eventually proposes to young Marguerite. When they marry, he is somewhere near sixty and she is seventeen. When she comes to England to marry him, she then has to learn to cope with her new stepchildren - three women older than she is, and the only son, Patrick, who is just a few years younger. Edward doesn't appreciate her attempts to smooth relations between her husband and his children, and Marguerite quickly understands that the marriage is not going to be what she thought.

The next section is from Marguerite's viewpoint, and relates the birth of her and Edward's two sons, and a daughter that lives only a short time. Other section include one from the point of view of Edward's son Patrick, Patrick's wife Sarah, Sarah's lover, the criminal Maxwell Drummond, and finally Patrick and Sarah's son, Ned.

Some of the topics - homosexuality, infidelity, and murder - were probably more scandalous to readers in 1974 than they are today, but Cashelmara is still a good, gossipy read.