Grace and favor

the long version

John Brook, a contemporary, all but reluctant American expatriate, believes that it is fate that has taken him from Washington to the Harvard Business School, then from Wall Street to Hong Kong to London. When, on the eve of a shooting party weekend, he awakens to find his English wife, Julia, missing from their bed, he sets off in search of her through her family's ancient stately home. The hushed and fearful conversation John overhears, soon magnified by Julia's refusal even to acknowledge it, is but the first in a series of ever more ominous events - wheels within wheels of intrigue, pitting a love of land against a lust for money - that threaten the couple's future, their children, and their lives. With its exact and compelling observation of an aristocratic world too often assumed vanished - an end-of-the-twentieth-century milieu of beguiling charm and hidden treacheries - Grace and Favor is, above all, a story of the enduring mystique of England. Its voice is utterly American; its theme, the eternal contest of history and possibility.