Behind the gates of Temple Alice, the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace.
To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires.
This elegant and allusive novel established Molly Keane as the natural successor to Jean Rhys.
‘I really wish I had written this book. It’s a tragi-comedy set in Ireland after the First World War. A real work of craftsmanship’ Hilary Mantel
The Girl from the Bogs
When Molly Keane’s best-known novel, Good Behaviour (1981), was pipped to the Booker Prize post by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children she did not much mind. She was ‘ecstatic’ over its...
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