House of Gold
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3.9 • 7 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Perfect for fans of THE TEA PLANTER'S WIFE
'This has everything - engaging characters, a thrilling story and beautiful scenery' KATIE FFORDE
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The start of a war. The end of a dynasty.
VIENNA, 1911. Greta Goldbaum has always dreamed of being free to choose her own life's path, but the Goldbaum family, one of the wealthiest in the world, has different expectations. United across Europe, Goldbaum men are bankers, while Goldbaum women marry Goldbaum men to produce Goldbaum children.
So when Greta is sent to England to marry Albert, a distant cousin she has never met, the two form an instant dislike for one another. Defiant and lonely, Greta longs for a connection and a place to call her own. When Albert's mother gives Greta a garden, things begin to change.
But just as she begins to taste an unexpected happiness, the Great War breaks out, threatening to tear everything away. For the first time in two hundred years, the family will find themselves on opposing sides. How will Greta choose between the family she's created and the one she was forced to leave behind?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set on the eve of WWI, this engrossing family epic by Solomons (The House at Tyneford) draws back the curtains on the opulent life of a European banking dynasty just as its world begins to shatter. The scions of the House of Goldbaum know their duties: marry other Goldbaums and serve the family. Even rebellious Greta Goldbaum will not risk her place in the family, and she obediently leaves her beloved Vienna to become the perfect English wife for her cousin, Albert. She had hoped he harbored a wild streak like their French cousin Henri or shared her brother Otto's sweetness, but she finds his passion for beetles and butterflies as horrifying as he finds her penchant for not wearing shoes. Their opposites-attract romance is palpable from their first encounter, and the turmoil roiling around them is just as captivating. Across Europe, the Goldbaums navigate what the reader knows to be inevitable: Russian pogroms, socialist reform, and the Great War itself. Though the family itself is close-knit, isolation permeates their lives as Jewish people in an increasingly anti-Semitic Europe, as oligarchs in a democratizing world, as individuals drowning beneath expectation. In Solomons's skillful hands, the plot winds around Europe and blossoms into a poignant portrait of characters stuck in an unavoidable paroxysm of global change.
