Isabel Colegate is best known for her bestselling and critically acclaimed novel, The Shooting Party, which was adapted into a now-classic film. Her works often explore English life in the post-war era, characterized by incisive observations of human psychology and social dynamics. Colegate is celebrated for her refined prose and her ability to craft complex characters and their intricate motivations.
Orlando King. Orlando at the Brazen Threshold. Agatha
This trilogy tells the story of Orlando King, his rise to ambiguous power during the moral confusion of the 1930s, his spectacular downfall and the troubled legacy he bequeathed to his divided family. As the 1950s draw to a close, his daughter Agatha accomplishes a painful resolution.
'Just the right mixture of doomed fun, melancholy and faintly lascivious despair' Observer'I am afraid I have something to tell you. It is that we are all about to be destroyed.'1914. The old standards are going. There is bitterness in politics, talk of civil war in Ireland.But all this means little to Cynthia Weston, attractive wife of cabinet member Aylmer Weston, and her nephew by marriage Philip. They are caught up in the charmed, perilous toils of a mutual passion that will destroy all they hold most dear – while the shadow of war lengthens and darkens, ready to swallow their world whole.A captivating portrait of a lost world, Statues in a Garden is a rediscovered masterpiece by one of the most important and neglected British female writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
It is 1913 - just prior to England's entry into World War I - and Edwardian England is about to vanish into history. A group of men and women gather at Sir Randolph Nettleby's estate for a shooting party. Opulent, adulterous, moving through the rituals of eating and slaughter, they are obtuse and decorative finale of an era.