Susan Howatch

In nineteenth-century Ireland, the de Salis family carries on through times of both riches and hardship, but their hard-won resilience will be threatened by tragedy of their own making. When Edward de Salis travels to America after the death of his first wife, he is astonished to find himself falling in love with Marguerite, a young woman many years his junior. Full of hope for the future, he returns to his Irish estate, Cashelmara, but in nineteenth-century...

Charles Ashworth, the bishop of Starbridge, is a man of great accomplishment, confidence, and conviction. Within the Church, he has earned a reputation as a strong, efficient, no-nonsense bishop. Outside the Church, he is known as “Anti-Sex Ashworth.” But when Ashworth's beloved wife dies, a profound crisis of his faith begin. unexpectedly and with brutal force. As bereavement overwhelms his spiritual equilibrium, his strict morality is quickly...

Among Mark Castallack's sons are men who want him dead, and this hardly promotes family harmony. Mark Castallack may have the woman of his dreams, a large fortune, and Penmarric, a Victorian mock-castle on the cliffs of Cornwall, but his private life is heading for disaster. His marriage fails, and when he takes a mistress he winds up with two families who hate each other. As the twentieth century unfolds, his children are left struggling to save...

Welsh heir Robert Godwin knows everything about his powerful family's interests, but what does he know of his own heart? Tucked in the hills of South Wales is Oxmoon, the ancestral estate of the Godwin family. In the summers before 1914, music streams through the family home as the Godwins, at the height of their prosperity, dance in the ballroom with their guests. But despite the remarkable talents of heir-apparent Robert Godwin, the fates have a...