As Anthony and Rachel Brinkley welcome their third daughter-in-law to the family, they don’t quite realize the profound shift that is about to take place.
For different reasons, the Brinkleys’ two previous daughters-in-law hadn’t been able to resist Rachel’s maternal control and Anthony’s gentle charm and had settled into their husbands’ family without rocking the boat. But Charlotte—very young, very beautiful, and spoiled—has no intention of falling into step with the Brinkleys and wants to establish her own household.
Soon Rachel’s sons begin to think of their own houses as home and of their mother’s house as simply the place where their parents live—a necessary and inevitable shift of loyalties that threatens Rachel’s sense of herself, breaks Anthony’s heart, and causes unexpected consequences in all the marriages.
Then a crisis brings these changes to the surface, and everyone has to learn what family love means all over again.
Joanna Trollope (1943–2025) was the author of historical novels and a study of women in the British Empire. However, she became best known for her lively contemporary novels, often centered on the nuances and dilemmas of domestic life in England. Her novel Parson Harding’s Daughter won the 1980 Romantic Novel of the Year Award from the Romantic Novelists’ Association. She was awarded the OBE in the 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honors List for services to literature. She was a descendant of nineteenth-century English novelist Anthony Trollope.View all by Joanna Trollope
