Good Behaviour

This novel is narrated by Aroon St Charles, an Anglo-Irish woman looking back on childhood and youth in a Big House where feeling is forbidden and 'good behaviour' covers cruelty. She records a hunting, debt-ridden family: a charming father, a cold mother, a worshipped brother, and servants who know more than they say. Love affairs, money troubles, and social rituals unfold while Aroon remains the large, awkward daughter who misreads what is happening. The setting is early twentieth-century Ireland among the fading gentry. The book is a comedy of manners whose subject is how a household trains people not to see.

Bound in brown cambric grain paper, wrap-around blocked with a colour picture by Debra McFarlane. Mid-blue slipcase.