Publication
St. Martin's Press (2009), Edition: 1, 416 pages
Original publication date
2009
Status
Available
Call number
Description
Wishing to track down a past girlfriend who claims he had fathered her child, the rich and dying Damian Baxter contacts an old friend from his days at Cambridge. The search takes the narrator back to 1960s London, where everything is changing--just not always quite as expected.
Physical description
416 p.; 9.56 inches
Language
Media reviews
The Independent
Embedded in the detailed descriptions of how the upper classes lived 40 years ago is a slimline plot. Damian Baxter, old, rich and lonely, is dying. Summoning an old enemy (once his closest friend) he concocts a Recherche du Temps Perdu mission among the debs he once slept with to find a child he
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may have fathered. His final act will be a coup de foudre for the family of this child, but Baxter plans to cushion the blow by leaving his fortune to his only offspring.
There are five ex-debs with children of the right age and the hapless narrator finds them one by one. What he discovers is that their lives now highlight the ways the world has changed, and they all seem to have a soft spot for Baxter. This is gruelling as he nurses a resentment against the man himself, the cause of which is revealed only at the end.
This is a book for a hot winter beach, an escape from life as we know it. Fellowes does us a huge favour in chronicling the world of class-bound aristocrats and their arcane snobbery. But in revealing their priorities, he gives us much to be grateful for in our own society now. Show Less