Book Summary

A dramatic, atmospheric novel in a grand storytelling tradition, The Sisters Mortland is beguiling, complex, hauntingly sad, and often dazzlingly funny. A tour de force of tales within tales, it sets the capstone on bestselling author Sally Beauman's literary career.

"If I didn't spy, I'd be in the dark eternally. I live in a maze of unknowing - Maisie's maze - and I hate it. I need to be informed."

Summer 1967: Thirteen-year-old Maisie is at her family's home, a decaying medieval abbey in the heart of rural Suffolk. Lucas, a student and friend, is painting a portrait of Maisie and her older sisters, Julia and Finn. In turn, Maisie embarks upon a portrait of her own: She begins an account of her family and of a summer in which their lives will irrevocably, and terribly, change.

She introduces us to arrogant, beautiful Julia; to intellectual, magnetic Finn; to honorable, conventional Nicholas, a neighbor training to be a doctor; and Gypsy-blooded Daniel Nunn, a village friend to the sisters and a longtime idol of Maisie's.

More than twenty years later, Lucas's now-famous portrait of the three sisters is the centerpiece in a major London retrospective of his work. Daniel, who's risen from rural poverty to a wealthy but soulless and troubled London existence, finds himself still obsessed with the three sisters and haunted by the summer of 1967. Now he embarks on a journey to understand what happened to their lives - and seek redemption for his own.

A dramatic, atmospheric novel in a grand storytelling tradition, The Sisters Mortland is beguiling, complex, hauntingly sad, and often dazzlingly funny. A tour de force of tales within tales, it sets the capstone on bestselling author Sally Beauman's literary career.