This Cold Country - Hardcover

Davis-Goff, Annabel

3.18

250 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151008477 ISBN 13: 9780151008476

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002

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The author of the New York Times Notable Book The Dower House, known for her elegant prose and her keen eye for the nuances of class, now adds the lush, large-screen immediacy of a Merchant-Ivory film to her compelling tale of a woman and a culture forever changed by World War II.
Only a few days after Daisy Creed precipitously marries Patrick Nugent, scion of an Anglo-Irish family, Patrick rejoins his regiment in France. Having never met her in-laws, Daisy sets sail for her new home, Dunmaine, County Waterford. The family's affairs echo its estate: grand and forbidding on the outside, decaying and corrupt within. Patrick's vain, spoiled sister, Corisande, soon flees to her lover, leaving Daisy alone with Patrick's feeble brother, Mickey, and grandmother, Maud, who has taken to her bed. In her determination to save Dunmaine and secure her place as its mistress, Daisy unwittingly becomes an accomplice in a dangerous political plot, as old and as fraught as The Troubles.
With grace and wit, Davis-Goff portrays a lost way of life and the war
that rendered it obsolete. In the character of Daisy Creed she has created
an unforgettable Everywoman of her time--part Elizabeth Bennett, part Scarlett O'Hara.

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Book Description:

Published in hardcover by Harcourt, 2002, 0-15-100847-7

From the Back Cover:

Known for her elegant prose and her keen eye for the nuances of class, Annabel Davis-Goff has written a compelling tale of a woman and a culture forever changed by the Second World War.

Daisy Creed, at the onset of the war is 20 years old. She is wooed by two young officers, and in the spirit of the time, Daisy precipitously marries. Never having met her husband's family, she embarks for her new home, Dunmaine, in County Waterford. Beautiful and grand on the outside, Dunmaine is decaying within. With only her eccentric brother-in-law and his silent grandmother for company, Daisy sets about saving the house and family. But before she can put the Nugent family's affairs in order she becomes an unwitting accessory to a murder and is drawn into a love affair that throws her life into disarray.
Daisy Creed is a resilient, courageous, altogether enterprising woman of her time in this novel about a way of life and the war that precipitated its transformation.

"A tour de force of narrative detachment and involvement, a deft, subtle, caring and honest novel that pursues and presents a vision of truths within a tiny tribal culture." --The Baltimore Sun

"The emotional undertow of the book keeps churning even after the last page is turned." --Seattle Times

Annabel Davis-Goff is the author of The Dower House, a New York Times Notable Book, and Walled Gardens, a family memoir. Born in County Waterford, Ireland, she lives in New York City.

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