Strangers - Softcover

Based on fact, but told with the imagination of a novelist, STRANGERS is the story of the author's family, the Tennants. Margot Asquith and Pamela Tennant (nee Wyndham), warring sisters-in-law; Pamela's children, her 'jewels' - Clare the wilful beauty, Stephen Tennant the outrageous aesthete, David the nightclub king, and the steady, sensible Christopher who becomes head of the family when the eldest brother Bim dies on the Somme - these are some of the characters brought to sudden and not always respectable life in this funny, touching and sometimes shocking novel. Their antics, dreams and grief are witnessed by the maid Louisa, and played out chiefly at Glen, the castle in the border of Scotland, where the young narrator pulls from long-sealed cupboards the stories of her family's past. But as the secrets emerge the myth woven around the glamorous figures of the past is both enhanced and dispelled. Haunting and compelling, STRANGERS presents a family and its young detective in a startling light.

'A brilliant book about the extraordinary and eccentric Tennant family' Antonia Fraser

'In this kindly but honest tribute to her family, Emma Tennant finds "the words for what had taken so long to forget and now takes an age to remember". Polite when disparaging and reserved when loving, it is impossible not to be charmed by the author...Strangers is her funny, elegant commentary on the combined power and irrelevance of our ancestors and the spells they cast' The Times

'Tennant's book is neither history nor analysis, but an evocation of a complex inheritance, "with its dead rumours and incontrovertible facts". She sifts through these with a supple, imaginative empathy and the skill of a practised novelist' Sunday Times

'A dreamy romantic read, a fabulous conjuring up of an aristocratic world...The book is full of charm, as you would expect from this accomplished and delicate novelist, and of brilliant and startling incidents...Vivid and often affecting...The book is full of such truthful recreation of past moments, both remote and near' Mail on Sunday

'Fascinating...This is an insider story about "the strange yet known monsters who are my family". It is written with huge sensitivity...Tennant wonderfully describes the mysterious mores of the upper class' Oldie