Book description
The Sparkling Cascade of diamonds was designed to adorn the women who
married into one of England's most prominent families - a symbol of the
wealth and privilege enjoyed by the Firths of Yorkshire. Instead the
magnificent necklace would come to burden the women who wore it,
becoming for them an emblem of bondage and inherited tragedy.
Pamela Haines's enthralling new saga tells of three generations whose
lives and destinies are linked through blood and inheritance of this
priceless heirloom. There is Lily Greene, star of the London stage, who
in 1898 weds the enigmatic sir Robert Firth, and for whom the diamond
waterfall comes to symbolize a state of degradation and humiliation she
never imagined possible. There is Lily's daughter, Sylvia, who is
married for this fabulous legacy and leads a life of love and torment.
And finally, there is Willow Gilmartin, who in the spring of 1945
removes the diamond waterfall from its bed of ivory satin-and at last
claims a heritage that has for so long eluded others.
Sweeping from a great Yorkshire estate to the Riviera and across Europe
- from the opulence of Edwardian London to the trenches of France in
World War I and back to England during one of her most dramatic
hours-this panoramic novel interweaves the lives of men who would fight
on the battlefields of two world wars and women who would carry forward
the traditions that defined them. Pamela Haines was born in Yorkshire,
like so many of the characters in her novels. Knaresborough, Leeds and
Harrogate have all played a part in her family background. She was
educated at a convent in the Midlands, and then read English at Newnham
College, Cambridge.
As a child she wrote non-stop, but around the age of seventeen, life
became too busy, and she did not write again until her late thirties, by
which time she was married to a doctor, and had five children. In 1971
she won the Spectator New Writing Prize with a short story, and
eventually completed her first novel, Tea at Gunter s
, in 1973. Critically acclaimed, it was the joint winner of the
Yorkshire Arts Association Award for Young Writers. It was followed in
1976 by A Kind of War
, described as a book to re-read and treasure in the Daily Telegraph
, and the even more successful Men on White Horses
followed in 1978. Haines has written four further novels
