Inheritance, Paperback

In this luminous novel about romance and illusion--and what's left of love when they're stripped away--an American Anglophile is drawn into the lives of a disintegrating aristocratic family.

After the sudden death of her husband, Annie Devereaux flees to England, site of the nostalgic fantasies her father spun for her before he deserted the family. A chance encounter in London leads Annie to cancel her return to New York and move in with Julian, the disaffected, moody son of Helena Denby, a famous British geneticist. As their relationship progresses, Annie meets Julian's sisters Isabel and Sasha, each of them fragile in her own way, and becomes infatuated with visions of their idyllic childhood in England's West Country. But the more she uncovers about Julian's past, the more he explodes into rage and violence. Finally tearing herself away, Annie winds up adrift in London, rescued from her loneliness only when she and Isabel form an unexpected bond.

Slowly, with Isabel as her reluctant guide, Annie learns of the emotional devastation that Helena's warped arrogance, her monstrous will to dominate, inflicted on her children. The family who once embodied Annie's idealized conception of England is actually caught in a nightmare of betrayal and guilt that spirals inexorably into tragedy.

Evelyn Toynton's most recent book was Jackson Pollock, published by Yale University Press in 2012. Her novel Modern Art was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was translated into Russian; Other Press published her second novel, The Oriental Wife, which has been optioned for a film and published in a Greek translation. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic, American Scholar, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Salmagundi, and Prospect, among others, and have been reprinted in several anthologies, including Rereadings; Mentors, Muses & Monsters; and Table Talk from the Threepenny Review.