L'écriture de Joanna Trollope explore les dynamiques complexes de la vie familiale moderne et des changements sociétaux. Son talent stylistique réside dans sa capacité à pénétrer la psychologie de ses personnages, capturant les nuances subtiles de l'interaction humaine. À travers ses œuvres, elle explore souvent des thèmes d'amour, de perte et de quête d'identité dans un monde interconnecté. Son approche se caractérise par l'empathie et une observation aiguë, attirant les lecteurs vers des expériences humaines partagées.
Rachel a trois fils : Ralph, Edward et Luke. Entièrement dévouée à ses enfants à présent adultes, elle contrôle leur vie avec poigne et conviction. Le jour où une crise éclate dans le mariage de l'un d'eux, elle se frotte aux nouvelles allégeances de ses garçons, désormais époux avant d'être fils, et dont les femmes sont fermement décidées à imposer leurs propres règles. Mais Rachel entend bien prendre les choses en main. Entre elle et ses belles-filles, la guerre ne fait que commencer.
Chrissie a toujours su que Richie les aimait, elle et leurs trois filles, ainsi que leur joyeuse existence rythmée par la musique. Un seul bémol : Richie ne l'a jamais épousée, et pour cause, il n'a jamais divorcé de Margaret, la mère de son premier fils. Quand il meurt brutalement, tout bascule ; Margaret et son fils, qui figurent sur le testament, font une soudaine réapparition. Pour Chrissie et ses filles, tout se fissure irrémédiablement.
Elles sont sueurs et pourtant aussi différentes que le jour et la nuit. Elinor, étudiante en architecture, est discrète, modeste et trop raisonnable. Marianne est impulsive, passionnée et rêve de devenir artiste. Mais un jour, leurs caractères et leurs certitudes sont mis à rude épreuve. Elinor doit-elle rester stoïque quand l'homme qu'elle aime s'abandonne dans les bras d'une autre ? Et il n'est pas sûr que la foi de Marianne en l'amour survive à sa rencontre avec le célibataire le plus séduisant de la région... Au fil de leurs aventures, les deux jeunes femmes apprennent la vie. Et dans un monde où la vie privée est exposée sur Internet, l'amour a bien du mal à triompher du scandale...
1988--As the rumblings of dissent and racial resentment began to erupt into a savage war between Boer and Briton, so three young men found their lives drawn together. Matthew Paget, son of an archdeacon, was turbulent, rebellious, and longing for excitement. Throwing away all the privileges that could have been his, he enlisted as a trooper--only to find himself loving the beautiful war-torn country of Africa and finally falling in love with a girl on the enemy side. Will Marriott, his cousin, was an officer who believed in England's greatness and the glory of battle. But as his comrades were maimed and killed, as he himself was wounded, and then betrayed by a one-time friend, so his values began to change. The one thing that never changed was his love for Frances, Matthew Paget's sister. Hendon Bashford was an upstart social climber, a swindler and a cheat. Half English, half Boer, he owed allegiance to no one while creating havoc in the lives of more honourable men. As the passage of war unfolded, so the lives of these three young men, and women they loved, moved towards a tumultuous climax.
On the fifteenth of February, 1879, the day on which Queen Supayalat of Mandalay ordered eighty members of of royal family to be clubbed to death, Maria Beresford celebrated her twenty-first birthday. On that day Maria knew nothing of Mandalay, the fairy-tale City of Gems. The selfish, difficult but heart-stoppingly beautiful daughter of a failed tea-planter in India devoted herself to pleasure. But when her father was sent to Burma, and she had to accompany him, she became embroiled in an exotic world of political intrigue. Her friendship with the Queen - a dangerous and unpredictable figure - and her growing closeness to Archie Tennant, a young man who has come east to seek his fortune after the ruin of his family business, brought her both danger and the key to her destiny.
Vanity Fair, Thackeray's panoramic, satirical saga of corruption at all levels of English society, was published in 1847 but set during the Napoleonic Wars. It chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different: Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals; and her schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a typically naive Victorian heroine, the pampered daughter of a wealthy family. Becky's fluctuating fortunes eventually bring her to an affair with Amelia's dissolute husband; when he is killed at Waterloo, Amelia and her child are left penniless, while Becky and her husband Rawdon Crawley rise in the world, managing to lead a high life in London solely on the basis of their shrewdness. (The chapter entitled "How to Live on Nothing" is a classic.) Thackeray's subtitle, "A Novel Without a Hero," is understating the case; his view of humanity in this novel is distinctly bleak and deliberately antiheroic. Critics of the time misunderstood the book, decrying it as (among other things) vicious, vile, and odious. But VANITY FAIR has endured as one of the great comic novels of all time, and a landmark in the history of realism in fiction.
The Taverners had lived at Buscombe, the mellow stone manor house in Wiltshire, for generations. They had farmed the land and sent their sons to war (and even, latterly, to commerce) in a way of life that seemed timeless. But in 1870 a new generation is about to take control - Tom Taverner, dedicated, impulsive, deeply caring about his inheritance, and his sister Catherine, intelligent, humorous, but frustrated by the limited opportunities open to women in a man's world. Tom marries, and agricultural depression hits the estate. And suddenly it seems that everything which was so secure can no longer hold. Stretching in time from the 1870s to the outbreak of the second world war, and in distance from Crete to East Africa, this warmly satisfying novel is a triumph of storytelling.
This novel explores the myths, the realities and the difficulties of trying to deal simultaneously with present relationships, past relationships and, above all, with other people's children.
