The Sisters Mortland - Hardcover

Beauman, Sally

3.58

1,514 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446578193 ISBN 13: 9780446578196

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2006

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Sitting for a portrait with her sisters in their decaying rural Suffolk home, thirteen-year-old Maisie evaluates her troubled family and her friendship with Daniel throughout the course of a summer that is marked by a life-changing accident. 75,000 first printing.

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About the Author:

Sally Beauman was born in England, in Devon, educated at a girls' school in the West Country, and then read English Literature at Girton College, Cambridge where she graduated in 1966. She has an MA in English Literature. Immediately after graduating, she went to live in America for three years, first in Washington DC,and then New York. During her time there she travelled extensively, visiting most of the states in the union: her experiences in the South in the year prior to the assassination of Martin Luther King, provided some of the background for her first novel, DESTINY. She began work as a journalist on the then newly launched NEW YORK magazine, and continued to write for it and other American publications after her return to England. She has written as a critic and reporter for numerous newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Sunday Times, the Daily telegraph, the Observer, the New York Times, and the New Yorker: it was an article about Daphne du Maurier, commissioned by Tina Brown and published in the New Yorker that eventually led to her writing her widely praised and best-selling REBECCA'S TALE, a novel that revisited and reimagined du Maurier's Manderley. She received the Katherine Pakenham prize for her journalism, and became the youngest-ever editor of Queen magazine (now Harper's and Queen). But after the birth of her son, she found the demands of journalism and motherhood hard to combine, so she turned to full time writing. Her first book was non-fiction, the definitive study of the UK's greatest theatre company: THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY: A HISTORY OF TEN DECADES (Oxford University Press,1982) -- her husband Alan Howard whom she met when interviewing him prior to his Hamlet at Straford upon Avon, was playing many leading Shakespearean roles with the RSC at this time. She then turned to fiction. Her first book, the controversial DESTINY (1986) earned her a record sum for a first novel: published in the US by Bantam, it became a New York Times number 1 bestseller, and went on to top the bestseller lists in the UK, Canada, Australia and South Africa. It has never been out of print since, and - widely misunderstood when first published - is now seen as a feminist, genre-subversive novel, a study of a materialist woman in a materialist man's world. DESTINY was followed by six other novels, DARK ANGEL, the study of a Victorian family's decline; the three linked modern thrillers, LOVERS & LIARS, DANGER ZONES and SEXTET; REBECCA'S TALE, her re-examination of du Maurier's REBECCA, which won her the du Maurier prize, and her latest book, the critically-acclaimed THE SISTERS MORTLAND: all have been best sellers, and all have been translated into more than 25 languages world-wide.

From Publishers Weekly:

With her latest gothic page-turner, Beauman (Rebecca's Tale) weaves a spellbinding tale of three charismatic English sisters and their irresistible pull on the men in their orbit. At the novel's start, it's summer of 1967 in Suffolk, England, where the Mortlands—gorgeous Julia; intellectual Finn (both in their early 20s); odd, imaginative 13-year-old Maisie; and their mother, Stella—live in a medieval abbey. Maisie, who narrates early on, is haunted by the death of their father—and by the abbey's long-gone nuns. Stella commissions Lucas Feld, a starving young artist, to paint the sisters. Julia and Finn, along with Lucas, Daniel Nunn (the sisters' childhood friend) and Daniel's friend Nick Marlow, spend the summer entangled in affairs of the heart while Maisie observes. With his paint brush, Lucas uncannily captures the passion, heartbreak and mystery of the bittersweet summer. But a horrific tragedy, the details of which Beauman suspensefully reveals over the rest of the novel, destroys the summer idyll. Fast-forward to 1991: Lucas is now a famous artist whose breakthrough painting The Sisters Mortland will soon show at a retrospective, and Daniel, who narrates this section, is suffering a mid-life crisis and still obsessed with the events of that fateful summer. With a conclusion narrated by Julia, this well-paced, haunting novel will captivate Beauman's fans. (Jan.)
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