Both satirical and touching, Hannah Rotschild's novel about a whimsical, dysfunctional English aristocratic family and their crumbling castle reminds us that women's lives and hopes are still shaped by the bonds of family and love.

For seven hundred years, the huge, gloomy Trelawney Castle in Cornwall - towers, decorations, rooms for every day of the year, four miles of corridors and five hundred acres - served as the magnificent and imposing "three-dimensional calling card" of the Earls of Trelawney. In 2008, however, it lies almost completely in ruins, thanks to the less and less flickering ambitions of the twenty-four counts, their financial incompetence, two world wars, the Great Depression and the inheritance tax. But the heir, Kitto, his wife, Jane, their three children, the dog, Kitto's anxious parents and his entomologist aunt, Tuffy, who studies fleas, still rise to the surface. The story is actually about four women: Jane, Kitto's younger sister, Blaze, who left Trelawney and made a successful financial career in London, the wild and beautiful, sensual, forbidden Anastasia, and Ajísa, his daughter. When Anastasia writes a letter that her nineteen-year-old daughter, Ajísa, is coming to live with the family for a long time, Blaze and Jane, who haven't seen each other in years, are forced to team up to welcome the new guest - and save the Trelawney house. But both are forced to face the discovery that a house alone is not enough to hold a family together