Fay Weldon turns her trademark empathy and wit to the lives and loves of an aristocratic family at the turn of the 19th century in her first historical series

A love story, a happy end, a lively attack, haute-couture dresses, and haute-cuisine meals: some quotable characters, some agreeable sex, some very witty lines—what else can you want from a novel? Unless perhaps a soupcon of Weldon perception and brains. Think fin de siecle and it's all here. Isobel, Countess of Dilberne, is obliged to pair off her handsome, willful son with a rich and pretty heiress from the Chicago stockyard. He's all the new internal combustion machines: she's all art. It's a clash of cultures and principles. Gold mines fail, bankers plot, bad girls flourish, London fog descends, Royalty intervenes, and your heart's in your mouth, hoping for the best for these unlikely lovers in the first in Weldon's Love and Inheritance trilogy.