This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I’m always up for a novel about a storied British family set in an ancestral manor. “The House of Trelawney” doesn’t disappoint; it has all the fixings: the patriarch and matriarch who are overly concerned with standards and tradition, unrequited love, the illegitimate love child, and good-for-nothing, up-and-coming heir.

This story centers around the aristocrats of Trelawney and the squandering of their fortune through the last 800 years. The current heir, Kitto, marries plain Jane Browne for her fortune and she in turn shoulders the burden of trying to single-handedly run the castle as Kitto and the children follow their own selfish interests. Blaze, Kitto’s sister, and a financial genius finds herself missing life at the castle even though she had supposedly been thrown out on her 18th birthday due to tradition. As the world tumbles toward the Great Recession of the early 2000’s and the fall of the banks, Blaze realizes she has nothing in her life except for work (and she is losing that) and decides to use her money and financial acumen to save Trelawney.

Although Blaze and Jane are the main characters, the other characters including Jane’s children Ambrose, Toby, and Arabella, Ayesha, the illegitimate child of one of the Trelawney heirs, and Clarissa, the Dowager Countess figure into the tapestry of the story, and their storylines are as interesting as the main characters,” and add to the question of whether the house makes the family or if the family makes the house. The descriptions of the crumbling manor and the grounds make me want to visit and explore.

Really enjoyed this one! It felt a lot like Crazy Rich Asians set among the landed gentry of Great Britain... and amid a recession and the consequences of some unfortunate decisions. The writer seems to have gotten the memo that, more so than “strong female characters,” what we actually need are INTERESTING female characters. Female characters who have weird flaws and have something to do with themselves besides fall in love, have babies, or try not to be “like other girls.” Every woman in this book surprised me at some point, and that’s not something that happens often enough, in my opinion. The writing was fresh and funny. Excellent reading for the middle of a pandemic.

I thoroughly enjoyed Hannah Rothschild's previous book and was very jazzed to hear she had another one out. House of Trelawney helped get me through this quarantine. The almost Dickensian travails of the Trelawneys, with the memorable cast of characters with their unique foibles was such a great distraction.
It was a perfect little escape from my pandemic anxiety and I'll be forever grateful (and a forever fan) of Rothschild for writing it!

House of Trelawney was an enjoyable book. It centered around an aristocratic family that has fallen in financial disgrace. This book also focused on the effects of maintain unrealistic standards when you don’t have the money.
I liked how the people who were dismissed as less than, where the ones who, who hard work and faith, kept life a float.
Interesting story about the 2008 crash - gave me something to think about.

This book was unusual as there were no "good guys" or no "bad guys".; just a variety of characters that at times the reader admired and other times the reader despised. I particularly enjoyed the castle parts, I thought the stock market parts ran on a little long--I just wanted to get through them. Without being a spoiler alert, I guess I understand why the author chose the ending that she did, but I would have preferred her to go the other way and kept expecting that on the last pages.

My main complaint about this book is many things I was eager to witness occurred off screen. How did Kitto take the news of Ayesha’s existence? What was her reunion with Mark like? Outside of that, this was a book I could hardly bear to put down, so fascinated I was by the Trelawneys and their dysfunctional relations with each other. I enjoyed how the author used the backdrop of the Great Recession to explore their changing fortunes and how it was an opportunity for growth or atrophy depending on the character.

If you ever wonder what might have happened to Downton Abbey families living in 2008, look no further than the House of Trelawney. The Trelawneys have been in Cornwall for 800 years; every generation added on to the house and lands, until, following the two wars of the twentieth century, the money ran out and the family, wearing blinders, refused to face the reality. The house, falling down around them, so buckets had to be put out every time it rained. The Earl and his wife, living in their own wing, still dress for dinner and have dinner on trays in their rooms, delivered by overworked Jane. Kitto, their son, had no business sense at all, as he traveled to London each week to tend his bank, while his wife, Jane, struggled to hold it all together. The dysfunctional aristocratic family members were all willing to hide their heads in the sand and ignore reality. Blaze, Joshua Wolfe, Aunt Tilly, Ayesha and many other characters helped move the story along

A good look at what many of the old, aristocratic families and estates are facing in England today.

An enjoyable read, that will likely be popular with women in the boomer generation. The story tells of a classic British family pulled between drama and comedy, all while addressing contemporary issues that mid-life women face.

Trelawney Castle: seat of the Earls of Trelawney for over 800 years; an architectural palimpsest, and once the jewel in the crown of the Trelawney estate. Recent generations, however, have been better at spending money rather than making it and now their beloved home is a crumbling prison. Heir Kitto and his wife Jane both do what they can, but are barely just keeping their heads above water. Their ruin will be hastened by three unexpected events: the appearance of a new relation, an odious and unscrupulous American hedge fund manager determined to exact revenge, and the financial crash of 2008.

In her debut novel, The Improbability of Love, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize For Fiction and winner of that year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, Rothschild turned her comic, satiric, and romantic eye on the Art world. A world that, as a former chair of London's National Gallery, she was well placed to comment on. In House of Trelawney, she turns that eye to the worlds of the British aristocracy and high finance. Which, as the daughter of a Baron, member of a prominent banking family, and non-executive director of various financial institutions, she is also well placed to comment on.

Her style has been compared to comic writers such as Waugh and Mitford, which are apt in terms of both style and milieu, but comparisons can also be made to Austen and Dickens, as she shares their ability to create comic characters and to then put those characters in situations that allows the author to make satirical/social commentary. Current Trelawney heir Kitto, for instance, is almost the archetypal bumbling, ineffectual aristocrat: financially incompetent and adding to their debts with his numerous unsuccessful investments. This is in contrast to his sister Blaze, who is a brilliant mathematician and financier, but Trelawney tradition dictates that younger sons and daughters are exiled from the family home at age eighteen to make their own way in the world. She’s also the only one to recognise the trouble brewing on the horizon but, like Cassandra before her, is unheeded and mocked for it. Some do come across more like caricatures, Kitto’s parents for instance, who insist on living as if nothing has changed, becoming an example of a bygone era preserved in aspic, or Thomlinson Sleet, who is pretty much a stereotypical arrogant, odious and near-villainous hedge fund manager. But it can be argued that this enhances the comedy and, though they may be lacking comparatively lacking in complexity, they’re rarely dull. Tonally, her writing is light but not lightweight: witty but sincere when a moment needs to be played straight. She deploys her knowledge with deft touch but uses the arcane incomprehensibleness of financial jargon to her advantage, adding to the comedic tone.

At the heart of the story is the relationship between three women: dependable Jane, the much put-upon and underappreciated wife of Kitto, whose whole identity has become subsumed by the house; Blaze, successful but unhappy, sure that love is something that happens to other people, despite the fact that fellow financier – the enigmatic Joshua Wolfe – appears to be interested in her; Anastasia, former friend to both Jane and Blaze, expelled from their lives years previously due to scandal and betrayal and yet who still exerts the gravitational pull of a black hole. Both Kitto and Sleet were in love with her (and, in the case of Kitto, still is), her letters to Jane and Blaze are the inciting incident and turns out to be what links most of the threads together. One will rediscover herself, one will find love and one will exact revenge.

Your mileage may vary when it comes to privileged characters, the subject of finance and all the money talk that goes with it, but House of Trelawney is an intelligent and entertaining romp.

This book seems to try desperately hard to be funny and fails just as hard.I was about 15 percent of the way in and still hadn't connected with any of the characters. Sure, they were all quirky, but there was no heart to them. When I found myself avoiding reading just to not read this book, I knew then it was time to call it. This was just not a good book (for me).

While reading this I wanted so much more about the Trelawney house and grounds beyond the rotting aspects, and the three or four ballrooms. More about Clarissa and her ideas about what's proper and what's not. More about Ayesha's mother's directions to Ayesha. Less padding about insects. Less intricacies of the banking meltdown in 2008. And an ending that didn't make me think of the Soprano's ending - or maybe my eARC was missing a final chapter that tied the ends together? On the plus side, the English class system is really depicted well, and Blaze's life choices make more sense than Kitto's. There are a lot of hints and tangents that we begin to explore and then drop that it was a little frustrating to read.

eARC provided by publisher.

This novel has Waugh-esque wry humor, unpredictable plot twists, a delicious romance, a decaying British estate in Cornwall, a shrewd but underestimated woman in high finance, the BBC, a grand old dame, vengeful social-climbing villains, and three dysfunctional generations of one family. What could be better?

"House of Trelawney" begins in 2008, and the world economy is about to fall apart, and so is Trelawney Castle. What will the family do? Heroic, long-suffering Jane has given her life to serving the current Earl, whose business ventures are making things worse. What do the women truly need to live happy and fulfilled lives? Except for Aunt Tuffy—an accomplished scientist with no use for any other human being— they may have to break out of several stock plotlines from British literature (in ways that made me chuckle) to find out.

This novel has one fault: the romance is flaky. It becomes irritating after a while, and not in a way that meshes with the rest of the black humor that makes this book so much fun.

Narrative style is engaging and funny, but the characters are so miserable and awful it makes reading a slog rather than a joy.