The author of the New York Times Notable Book The Dower House, known for her elegant prose and her keen eye for the nuances of class, now adds the lush, large-screen immediacy of a Merchant-Ivory film to her compelling tale of a woman and a culture forever changed by World War II. Only a few days after Daisy Creed precipitously marries Patrick Nugent, scion of an Anglo-Irish family, Patrick rejoins his regiment in France. Having never met her in-laws, Daisy sets sail for her new home, Dunmaine, County Waterford. The family's affairs echo its estate: grand and forbidding on the outside, decaying and corrupt within. Patrick's vain, spoiled sister, Corisande, soon flees to her lover, leaving Daisy alone with Patrick's feeble brother, Mickey, and grandmother, Maud, who has taken to her bed. In her determination to save Dunmaine and secure her place as its mistress, Daisy unwittingly becomes an accomplice in a dangerous political plot, as old and as fraught as The Troubles.With grace and wit, Davis-Goff portrays a lost way of life and the war that rendered it obsolete. In the character of Daisy Creed she has created an unforgettable Everywoman of her time--part Elizabeth Bennett, part Scarlett O'Hara.

During the First World War, ten-year-old Alice Moore is left in the care of her autocratic grandmother at Ballydavid, a lovely country house in County Waterford. Living in a rigid, old-fashioned household where propriety is all, Alice is forced to piece together her world-a world on the brink of revolution-from overheard conversations, servants' gossip, and her own keen observations. She soon realizes that her family's privilege comes at a great cost to others-among them a psychic countess down on her luck, a Roman Catholic boy whom Alice hero-worships, and an admired governess, as well as most of her neighbors. After the Easter Rising, when blood is spilled close to home and loyalties are divided, tensions within Ireland and Ballydavid mount. Alice is forced to choose between her heritage of privilege and her growing moral and political conscience.